Become Like Gods
by Laryna6
Summary: Once it was known that the greatest of sinners, those too evil for hell itself to take them, return as vampires. A murderer of billions has awoken in a time when only a few survivors recall even distorted versions of the truth, and it is hungry.
1. Chapter 1

_Vampires!_

_In another one-shot I was doing, I was trying to invoke cosmic-horror-type 'wrongness' and zombie apocalypse. Because the RMXverse seriously asks for it, and zombie apocalypses are a meme nowadays. They're all over the place._

_A line there made me think of vampire!Zero, which seemed an awesome premise for a crackfic. Unfortunately, this thing ended up pretty dark, and more emphasis on the magical realism than the whole vampire thing. The original concept of vampires was that they happened when someone committed especially terrible sins (Vlad the Impaler did some pretty horrible stuff). If you go with the Cataclysm, which I will do until Capcom provides an actual explanation instead of teasing us with them in the new Classic series games and then going 'denied!' (Not to mention that Capcom has sometimes said that fan speculation about an upcoming game was wrong and then it turned out to be right when the game came out…) then Zero is guilty of patricide, a ton of fratricide, one complete genocide (robot masters) and one major dieback._

_The concept of someone committing a crime so terrible that they don't even deserve death (which is probably the only real human right: even taxation is a privilege, since it requires that you matter to someone, if only as a resource), and the only fitting punishment is to exist forever with what they have done is already present in the Megaman series: it's the sentence of Dr. Weil in the Zero series._

_Severe anemia is the basis of quite a few characteristics of vampires: it's natural to associate pale skin with sunburn and hence vulnerability to the sun, for one thing. And the idea that if you drink blood, it'll end up in your veins somehow is pretty logical to the medieval mind, so it might even have been the prescription for anemia. Ah, the theory of the four humors. The vulnerabilities to silver and gold that few bring up nowadays are due to the elemental symbolism (water, like running water, and sunlight respectively). Water clenses, and sunlight's even a disinfectant (UV radiation does that). Fusion is 'the power of the sun,' and even symbols of the sun's power have negative effects. Zero's own reactor wouldn't work since that's a life process and he's a vampire in this, but if one were installed into him and wasn't shut down by safety systems, he'd be crispy toast._

_I like taking the rational approaches to irrational things. 'Ok, this person needs blood, can we do a bone marrow transplant?' etc._

_Disclaimer: I don't own Rockman/Megaman, X or otherwise, Capcom does. No infringement intended or money made._

* * *

Hunger was a useful instinct, like a flashing warning light. The need for more energy, raw materials, or a specific raw material in order to continue functioning. Feeding was a basic function of life, one of the three criteria for it, in fact.

So it was accurate to say that when he woke up, he was _starving_. He required several things, urgently, and if he didn't get them within a few minutes then he would weaken and shut down again. Emergency autopilots, meant to take over if his body was too damaged for his personality to remain conscious or he was too busy focusing on something else to spare the attention for easy battles, basic defense, had taken that data in and acted accordingly, keeping him asleep for he didn't know how long.

He wasn't even aware enough to ask.

All he knew, all he could spare the energy _to _know was that there was something he needed, something he would die without, three meters above him. Making its way closer.

It took more effort than it should have to dig his way up, but it was simple enough to subdue the unit he could extract resources from (the prey) once he reached the tunnel. That bought him a little more time.

Gasps of surprise, horrified shouts and squawking were ignored as he lapped up the last of the resources that had been sent to repair the wound that he'd made in the robot drone and scanned the area. Tactical AI classified them quickly: Three more humanoid robots, likely about as advanced as Sniper JOE units – they clearly weren't robot masters, robot masters would have been accessing their signal webs already – and two humans.

His purpose was to destroy the human race, but he couldn't do that if he didn't survive. First priority was to incapacitate the drones, take out their processors and signaling capability so that they couldn't call a robot master for assistance devising a solution set when they realized that this was outside their programmed capacity to handle.

That, and the wounds brought their internal fluids to the surface, making it easier to feed. The first robot had bought him some time, but time alone: there hadn't been enough to conduct any repairs, and he could feel his strength draining away again.

The humans were still making noises as he fed – no energy to spare to burn up translating sound into speech – but when one tried to come towards him with a tunneling device he had to spare the energy to backhand it into a wall hard enough to crack its skull open. The other took a step back then, and another, and he couldn't have the damn thing running for help either, could he?

Stupid animals wasting his time when every second and every thought had to count… Except that was the scent of iron in the air. And water could be broken down into fuel, as soon as he could get his internal fusion power working again.

Most of the first human's blood was wasted on the ground before he got to it: the second he bit at the throat, after snapping its neck (he wasn't thinking, let alone thinking of Dr. Wily, but that had been how he'd killed his first human, hadn't it?) and let that internal pump work for him.

That allowed him to use some of what he'd gotten from the robots to repair something instead of breaking it down into raw materials.

He was still starving. He needed more prey, so obviously the sensor systems came first.

He was under a city. There was radio, and more drones, but not the wireless web, with a robot master or Mother computer at the center of it, that cities once had. Tactical lowered the probability he'd be facing a robot master soon, and upped the probability that he'd managed to exterminate them.

Low-threat urban warfare mode it was. There wasn't time to spend on defensive moves; he needed to acquire necessary resources _now. _A note was still made to repair teleport capability after basic life support functions, so that he could get out of here if he felt a robot master teleport in or bombs on the way.

The hunt progressed as projected, except that for some reason he took damage while in clear view of the sky. It was better to stay indoors, stick to cover in any case. In the beginning, there was an even ratio of humans and servitor drones (odd that most of them were humanoid), until first the humans started to be evacuated from new areas before he reached them and then combat capable drones were sent in. Luckily, their response time was fast enough that there wasn't a window of starvation between old prey leaving and new prey arriving, and combat robots had more self-repair resources.

The situation would have been optimal if it weren't for the fact that his life support systems _were not repairing themselves_. He could repair other systems and they would stay repaired – although using his buster would burn too much valuable energy – but even when he took the risk of holding still long enough to reboot, he simply could not seem to produce new nanites.

That was a problem that required higher cognitive functions to solve, and high-level emulation not only burned a large amount of energy but he needed to task a very large number of scavenged nanites to that area of his processor before it could even be booted up.

The arrival of a second group of combat drones provided that.

The obvious discrepancy between his current state and his healthy, optimal one was that the virus was not present in his systems. His inability to produce new nanites included virus nanites. A full copy of his plans was stored in the virus: certainly that could be used to find and fix whatever bug was currently aborting that function. However, in order to repair the systems that could produce the virus, he needed the virus.

Then the simple solution was to find someone or some lab capable of creating nanites, and either force them to make the virus according to the template he had stored or use the equipment himself. Luckily, those sorts of places tended to be well-guarded, high enough on the human priority list for actual army robot drones to be sent to reclaim them, so the resources he would need in order to continue to work would be delivered. Large numbers of high-quality ones, at that. It should be simple enough provided that either there was no robot master at that lab or he was able to store enough energy beforehand to defeat him in his own domain.

In order to find a lab, however, he needed to wake up enough to start paying attention to human speech and radio chatter, and either find a computer to hack or leave someone alive long enough to interrogate them.

Robot drones were terrible at real combat. Humans were one thing, but send robots against a robot master in territory they'd claimed and they'd just hack them and either make the robots serve them or trigger the self-destruct: humanity had found that out during the very first uprising. He didn't have the ability to hack (well, not _robots_) in that manner, but their combat AI was no match for his own_ autopilot AI_, let alone _him, _when he was actually thinking about what he was doing.

Honestly, if there were still robot masters, one would have shown up by now. Whoever was ordering these drones to attack him should know by now that it might as well be ordering them to self-destruct, it accomplished the same thing. Really, it would have been _better _if the idiot human ordered them to self-destruct, because then he couldn't feed from them, but the human hopefully had no way of knowing that all it had to do was wait and Omega would cease functioning on his own.

It couldn't be a robot master in charge. Robot masters couldn't _stand _to see their own lower-level robots destroyed uselessly. If there were any left, either the humans were ordering them not to go… or it was taking time for them to be converted into a warbot. Like Megaman.

There were few things more dangerous than a motivated robot master. Luckily, he was one of them.

But not while he was this weak. If one came, it would be in order to take him on alone, and without cannon fodder to provide him with energy refills it wouldn't take long for a robot master, _designed_ to locate and fix system bugs and design flaws, to figure out what his problem was.

Think of the devil.

There was a single unit approaching his current location, with other units remaining where they were (cowering in fear). He still couldn't detect a network, meaning it was very, very likely all of that capability had been shut down, rechanneled.

Warbot.

One that was trying to take him on with a _melee weapon_. What? That was simply not computing. There was no way they should know that he wasn't able to create the nanites he'd used to infiltrate their systems and cause them to blow up. There had been only two robot masters with unique components that were able to defend against that tactic, and this was neither of them. Robot masters networked, shared data, problem-solved: unlike robots, they had the brains to know when something was a stupid idea and they _used _them. (Most of the time…)

Wait. What if this robot master was willing to enter Omega's strike radius because he had a copy of DWN.024's unique fabrication system? He could be planning on deploying his own poisons. If he had _that_ system, then he would have the ability to make virus.

For the first time, Omega used the active enemy scan function instead of passive detection abilities.

This wasn't a drone.

This was an _android_. He'd been killing androids this entire time. If he'd been thinking, he would have realized it before: robots wouldn't have the nanites he required in their systems.

These weren't drones or humans. He'd been killing _people_.

The people he was built to protect. To create a new world for.

He had to stop. He stumbled away from the android, barely forcing himself to move.

He was hungry. He had to stay alive, he had to see if there was any way to repair and save any of them. He had to stay alive, or else everything had been for nothing.

He was so, so hungry. It was taking everything his half-awake mind had to keep his autopilot from just reaching out and killing this one. So strong, he'd provide enough for awhile, but then he'd need another and another! This one was stronger than the others, were humans ensuring that androids were weak, what was going on? He had to stay active to find out what was going on, but if he stayed active in this body then he'd have to kill, and kill, it was so hard not to!

He'd have to self-destruct, transmit himself to backup again, wait for another body to be built and hope that it didn't have this problem. He knelt there, clutching his head with his arms so neither of them reached out or formed a buster, trying to gather enough energy in his head for the transmission, which drained energy from everything else and made the hunger grow, and grow, gnawing at him, driving him mad… Or, why not take over one of these nearby bodies?

It would have been a relief when the android knocked him out if he'd been conscious enough to see what was happening before he shut down improperly, fragmenting the personality he'd been scrambling to move and only getting a few instants of transmission out, a signal too weak to reach anything further than arm's reach.

The important things had gone first, of course. His mission.

The virus.

* * *

"I've never seen anything like this before. I have no idea how to repair this."

"It explains a lot." X's face was pale, and once again Dr. Cain thought of the work it must have taken to design X to display his emotions so naturally and accurately, instead of seeming artificial or falling into the uncanny valley. X could switch off the display function, of course, when he needed a poker face, but it was obvious when he did that and otherwise, he wore his heart on his sleeve. "We need to find whoever did this." And not for revenge.

"I have no idea how to fix this. Obviously, one of the first things I tried was to implant a replacement part, but the repair nanites it produced just turned it into a copy of the original within six hours. That's major surgery: doing it every six hours for the rest of his life just isn't possible." It would be a very short life, fiddling with delicate components that often.

"It's possible that his builder might know how to fix this. Think about it. What if the part isn't faulty, and that's why they're putting it back the way it was. What if it was disabled?"

"To get around the laws against using untested nanites outside containment?" Reploids used nanites that were based on X's, which were very, very thoroughly tested. "I should have thought of that right away. If his designer could get his reploid design to function without nanites derived from yours, without breaking the law, long enough for a demonstration then he could patent it as his own, unique design."

"Allowing him to make more without our approval." X nodded. He wouldn't withhold approval normally, and he wasn't asking for money, but there were things he wasn't going to allow reploids to be used for, not if he could help it, and this reploid was clearly built for the main one. "Except, that seems to have triggered some very well-designed survival protocols. Whoever built this reploid is a genius. If they're still alive," and he hoped the reploid wouldn't have to wake up to find that he'd killed his own father, "we have to find them. You know how much this extra shielding here would increase safe operating time in high-pressure conditions." They'd never been able to get that to work with currently-available materials. "And that's just what I can see at first glance!" Dr. Cain had been looking over the irregular for hours before X finished tending to the wounded.

"Actually, his designer _didn't _manage to get that design to work. His internal fusion reactor can create a magnetic bubble, but it can't seem to contain the reaction at all. The instant one starts, his fusion chamber is damaged and it shuts down the reaction. If we can't install another power source, he's going to need to run off of e-cans and recharges alone." In the same way that plants stored energy from photosynthesis as sugar, reploids stored the energy they generated that they didn't use immediately in the form of chemicals, which could be broken down by specialized nanites to restore power to areas whose wires were cut off. In fact, a lot of hazardous duty reploids _only_ used that system of internal energy transportation, reserving wires for duty as a nervous system, in order to prevent power surges. Not that nervous systems couldn't fall prey to power surges. Seizures were still a common cause of death among humans.

Dr. Cain's studies as a biologist were serving him well, really. It wasn't as though organic life forms didn't already use electricity and conductivity to their advantage (the human heart and nervous system were obvious examples), but instead they essentially did everything on battery power, energy stored in chemical form. There were some reasons to consider building reploids who didn't generate their own power internally at all, in fact, and only one of them was that, after what had happened during the Cataclysm, some people didn't want to be anywhere near a fusion reactor any more than they'd want to stand next to a pile of uranium.

The reactor problem wasn't as big of a problem as the nanites, because they'd already put together a working theory of how to handle something like that. "Well, either that doesn't speak well for his builder's talent, or it's another piece of evidence that he was only turned on for a trial run. His fusion generator design does seem similar to mine, so it's likely that his builder was going to try to replace it with another power source before unveiling his creation." Which would explain why he hadn't fixed a problem that obvious and important. "There are accounts that a few robot masters were solar-powered, which might explain why his system heats up so fast when exposed to sunlight."

One of Dr. Cossack's creations, Pharaohman, had been powered not by the light of the sun but by its heat. Faced with the difficulty of keeping a robot master designed to work in the desert from overheating, Dr. Cossack had turned the problem into an asset. Instead of sucking up power like a sponge, the way Pharaohman cooled down had supplied his power.

Given his reflective surfaces and overall light coloring, the irregular shouldn't have heated up in the sunlight as quickly as he did. Dr. Cain had also noticed that while most reploids had nanites checking over their surface area, in the same way that humans had semi-symbiotic bacteria on their skin, this one didn't. Not because he didn't have any to spare but they kept breaking down when exposed to ultraviolet radiation. He didn't seem to have proper shielding against _any _radiation, in fact, and a good EMP blast should have killed him (and an EMP mine had been tried, several).

Despite that, "Sigma pointed out something. If he was running on autopilot that entire time, and he didn't have enough nanites for conscious function, then his tactical AI and some of his performance curves have to be better than _yours_."

"Something must have allowed him to operate despite all these problems," X agreed.

"Whoever built him could do so much for all reploids, but have you been paying attention to the news at all? No one's used the death penalty in a hundred years," it made more sense to send them into dangerous areas to gather resources, sparing the lives of others and letting nature take care of it. "But it's being called for. This is criminal negligence at its worse, even if you're right and the cause of it all was avoiding the 'grey goo' risk." The worry that nanites might spread uncontrollably, like Von Neumann machines. There wasn't a real risk of that. Earth had its own, native, microscopic Von Neumann machines, and they were very good at dealing with anything that tried to mess with them. Antibiotics, radiation, the human immune system, each other… Faulty, untested nanites (if they were working, then they wouldn't be out of control) wouldn't stand much of a chance against breeds of killing machines honed over millions, sometimes billions of years.

"How quickly do they break down inside his system?"

"I'm not sure. He seems to have consumed," the word made X grimace: it seemed somehow wrong to use it for a reploid, especially given what was being… consumed, "a few times his own weight. Either some problem was making him destroy them, or he was burning through them trying to repair something that couldn't be repaired. Not to mention the energy he'd have to burn dealing with so many opponents." Dr. Cain shook his head. "I don't know how I'm going to tell Sigma that if he'd stopped ordering hunters in to help keep him pinned down for the evacuation he'd have fallen over on his own before too long."

"Have you tried a transfusion of repair nanites?" That was standard surgical procedure, to give the recovering patient a little boost. "Normally, they last a few days before getting worn out, and that would be something." Perhaps they'd be able to wake him up and find out what this irregular could tell them.

No good. "They got used up trying to repair his own nanite production system. Right now, it's like pouring water into a sieve."

"So we'd have to disable his own self-repair functions?" That was going to be tricky. Androids had been designed not to be reprogrammed, and this was base programming. "If we could wake him up, maybe we could explain the situation and ask him to?"

Dr. Cain fiddled with his console a bit to pull up a different one of the charts he'd been putting together from the data he had. X's eyes widened and he leaned forward over Dr. Cain's shoulder to get a better view.

"My best guess is that he kept trying to maintain conscious thought when he didn't have the resources to do it with, and given that those were other people's nanites he was trying to use to think with? I'd be amazed if he has any memories left. Frankly, he's more likely to have _other people's_ memories than his own."

X pulled up a different graph. "We're going to have to replace…" Oh dear. "I don't think that we can salvage anything of his original personality or programming, if he was even awake long enough to really have a personality." Reploids were nanite-program hybrids, and the irregular couldn't replace his nanites, his programs were scrambled, and they were going to have to replace the area that dealt with 'emotions,' which was what newbuilts tended to start from. "Perhaps a few fragments, if these chips can be repaired." It looked like the crystal on his forehead had been holding a key component, and it had gotten smashed: they might have a chance to pull something off when they replaced it. "Or do you have any ideas?" X hoped he was missing something.

"We can try programming the replacement chips not to try to fix that part of his body. If we can get him awake long enough to explain why not, then we might have a chance. At that point it comes down to compatibility. We might be able to get his systems to accept a normal replacement part with his help."

"And anti-hacking defenses. Humans have trouble with their bodies turning on transplanted organs, and you're going to be transplanting… two–thirds of his brain, between the chips and the nanite transfusion?"

"At this point we have enough trouble without borrowing it," Dr. Cain reminded him, chuckling at the thought of X being the less optimistic one.

* * *

Nanite batches lasted a week before breaking down, unless he went on a hazardous mission or training got a little rough. Which it did, often enough. Zero didn't mind, nor did he blame them. He'd killed their friends, after all. That was why he was here, to take the most hazardous missions, and even though hunters were practicing to capture instead of kill _reploids_, now that non-sentient mechanaloids had been invented they had to deal with those too, so it was good to learn how to shoot to kill.

It was what he owed them.

If someone was going to die, then it should be him, no matter what Sigma said about wasting Dr. Cain's hard work.

His sleep capsule gave him a readout, and he also had a handheld thing that a visiting human had compared to an insulin meter.

He could have tried to go to the infirmary discretely, but it wasn't as though it did any good. People watched him for it, and told rookies stories in whispers at the edge of his hearing. The red demon- do you know he drinks blood? He was covered in it when they brought him in. Be careful when you're around him, because if he gets too low he'll lunge for your throat. How low is too low? He ate two whole units, cops, civilians, even humans and they don't even have nanites.

Bloodthirsty monster.

He has to be getting bored with how the infirmary stuff tastes, they'd say, and then the rookies would wonder if they looked tasty and flinch away from him in the halls.

He didn't mind, it was only fair.

Can't survive without repair nanites, half-dead anyway, should hurry up and get himself killed the rest of the way.

Well, that was what he was here for.

What made it even worse was that he _did_ like it. The hunger would gnaw at him, as his levels lowered, and then when he gave in and drank there was this rush of relief, the same as he saw on the faces of rookies who had survived a firefight, laughing and high-fiving each other as the adrenaline wore off.

Just like them, there was the survivor's guilt after the rush passed, but that just made him want to feel better again, and his body's programming, the 'instincts' other reploids didn't have knew what made things better.

He didn't watch movies with the others, it was generally at night and he made them uncomfortable all the time, but there had been enough comments about addiction as well as vampires that he'd looked it up.

Drowning his sorrows, huh?

It didn't taste bad, or boring, and that was part of the problem. He would do anything he could to avoid drinking in front of others (but some officers had the right to order him to top off, 'just to make sure'), and while he acted stoic most of the time the taste made him shudder with relief, and then they looked at him with horrified eyes and looked away with shudders of their own and he felt so ashamed.

No one wanted him near Dr. Cain or X, and that was part of why people kept tabs on his runs to the infirmary. Sigma was the only one who looked at him and didn't see a vicious monster. No, he even claimed that Zero had managed to fight the hunger, succeeded in sparing his life just long enough, and Zero wished he could believe that but the general was just too good a man.

Training X, he saw where Sigma got it from, and X went out of his way to show Zero he didn't mind even though X had been the one trying for hours and hours to save the lives of even a handful of his victims. So yes, he could definitely see General Sigma lying to make him feel better, especially since Dr. Cain confirmed that he hadn't had any conscious function, trying to reassure him that there wasn't any way he could have fought the hunger.

He didn't blame him for lying. He appreciated the thought, really. General Sigma was the one who had given him this chance, the one who cracked down on any hazing he saw (but they did it out of his sight, and Zero wasn't going to play snitch when they had every right to act that way), the one who believed that he could amount to something. That he could be useful.

Zero had been fine with the way things were, really. Even if he could only save a handful of people, maybe, eventually?

General Sigma believed in him. Saying that Zero had spared his life was a lie, but one he wouldn't have made unless he wanted Zero to live. Wanted him to feel better. Thought that he was worth something, that…

He didn't mind training X for him, even though it made things worse. It was an honor, an undeserved one but another sign that Sigma _trusted_ him when no one else did. He would have walked into a smelter for the General, and just been grateful.

Then that, that wasn't _him_, and…

The second time he came back from the dead in Dr. Cain's lab, Zero really, really wanted to ask the man to _stop doing that_, because he didn't _want _to come back to life, but X was in danger again and Sigma had asked Zero to look after X (to keep an eye on him), so he went.

The vampire jokes just got worse now that he'd risen from the grave, but there wasn't the same hatred behind them. The veterans were dead, or worse than dead, and it was the rookies now that were telling them to other rookies, people to whom the enemy wasn't irregulars, with Zero the symbol of the evil they could do, but the virus instead.

Sigma was the one that made them shudder, the target of their hatred, and he really, really wished things could go back to the way they were before. That just wasn't possible, any more than it had been possible to rewind time and shoot himself before the rampage happened, but that didn't keep him from wishing it was, on those long, dark off-duty hours when he just didn't know what to do with himself except curl up around a bottle and stare at a wall or the night sky while he watched memories behind his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

_Even though I'm trying to stick with mythology, I think I am going to borrow the World of Darkness thing with vampire blood being addictive and making people want to do what the vampire wants, even though Renfield was a creation of the novel. _

_I'm kind of skipping over/summarizing the important bits of the aftermath of the wars in this 'verse. Lazy shortcut, I know. I need to get back to writing action, but then I do this crazy battle scene for _Tree of Thoth_ and the headache that was burnt me out on it a bit. I need to up the sex and violence level in my stuff, darn it... Anyway, since I'm lazy, this fic will presume more game knowledge than I usually do in this fandom. The first act of this chapter is right after this world's version of the third war._

_The second is the fourth war, of course, and the last is the beginning of the fifth. The next chapter will jump backwards in time from there, actually, doing a scene in between the fourth and fifth wars that really did need to be read in the context in all of this, since the fifth war is when things will get screwy, as usual._

_Disclaimer: I don't own Megaman, X or otherwise, Capcom and other rightful owners do. No infringment intended or money made._

* * *

"Dr. Doppler's vaccine is modeled after a normal vaccine, which is designed to teach our immune system to recognize something as a threat. Sometimes, we use a cut-down verion of the actual virus – obviously he's not doing that, just inert nanites modeled to have the right 'shape.' The maverick virus, like a biological virus, has to trick the victim into making more of it in order to succeed in infecting. If a reploid's systems recognize it as trash, faulty nanites, then they can get rid of it, instead of it being able to trick the system into thinking it has a job to do." Which it did, just not a job anyone wanted it to do. "Ideally, after enough vaccinations the reploid's conscious mind might be able to recognize that shape as well, and then hunters would have an early warning of mavericks in the area, as well as the ability to consciously optimize antivirus efforts."

That, right there, was the reason Zero was immune. The virus could get in his systems all it liked; it just couldn't proceed to Stage II. If anything, it was a good thing when he ran into it. In order to blend in to a normal reploid's systems, the virus had to act like normal nanites. In fact, eventually all of a maverick's nanites were replaced with virus nanites. For Zero, the virus was just a free source of repair nanites, boost nanites, and so on.

Being in an infected area was something he enjoyed, actually, which was incredibly disturbing. The nagging sense of wrongness and hunger, that there was something he needed that he wasn't getting, wasn't there. He was getting a constant, low-level influx of nanites, barely any but that was how a normal reploid's systems worked.

The same sort of comfortable feeling he'd once gotten around Sigma.

A human might have compared it to scuba diving versus coming up for air. No matter how used someone could get to it, there was always the awareness that the air could run out, and after a long swim it was nice to surface and be able to breathe freely, without all that equipment. Zero couldn't look away from the meter that showed the time he had ticking by, second by second, or minute-by-minute when he was taking damage and needing to burn them up for repairs.

He'd tried to hide it, but unbeknownst to him his unit had noticed and it had become part of his legend. That he came alive on the battlefield, although there were other variations.

"I couldn't figure out how an infected batch got past all the tests," Dr. Cain said, scratching his head, "and eventually I had to consider that maybe one _didn't_. The way Doppler was able to fight it off, if temporarily, is simply unprecedented. Look at this."

It wasn't a good idea to run tests related to the virus anywhere any reploid, except X, could find out about them. When they did need to do something under the radar, the canisters they had to keep aside for Zero, a mix of all types instead of just repair nanites, were luckily an excellent replacement for Petri dishes. Not to mention the ease of getting rid of the evidence. Everyone knew that Zero's batch was getting tinkered with, because if it was possible to build a new reploid with his unique defect and it could _survive_, then they would have more immune reploids. They still couldn't manage it, because function nanites could be replaced with generics, but the nanites reploids used to think with? They _needed _to be able to customize those, build them from the ground up. They still couldn't figure out exactly how Zero was managing it.

"Take a look at this," Dr. Cain said, pulling up a few photos. "We've seen how the virus interacts with normal nanites. Obviously, the vaccine had to be designed to mimic that interaction, the way a vaccine needs to mimic part of the way a virus interacts with cells."

"The way it tricks them into letting it in. Yes?" The vaccine did seem to be doing that.

"The tests should have been performed over a longer time period. We proved that yes, vaccinated individuals had no infections, even with double blind tests and every precaution taken to make sure Sigma couldn't interfere with the test results. Take a look at this canister."

"What on earth caused that?" The nanites weren't sitting there in the solution, they were actively _moving_, as though there were instructions they were trying to carry out. Instructions to do what?

"The vaccine. It's something about the _shape_ of the virus, perhaps the key it uses to get the system to think that it belongs there, there's no other explanation." Dr. Cain tapped his pencil on the desk. "Once nanites have been exposed to the vaccine, and presumably even more so with the virus, they may think it's something that belongs there. Not just that: their nanites wearing themselves out like that would make them feel ill."

"Mimicking withdrawal. Once exposed to the virus, even a trace amount that can't manage to do anything, a hunter would 'feel better,' on a second exposure. And a third, and… In theory, reploids shouldn't be subject to Pavlovian programming, but this, the virus is something that goes after _what we use to think with_. They can't search their feelings if that's what's wrong."

"A vaccinated hunter, well, you know the risks they take. It's such a relief not to have to be afraid anymore. So they take more and more risks. Dr. Doppler created a gateway drug. We're going to have to take every single vaccinated hunter off of active duty until we see if there's some way to get rid of the addiction." Quit cold turkey. "If Sigma got a few mavericks in there then they were all being constantly exposed in that enclave. If something feels good, it's hard to say no to it."

"Meaning it's possible that Dr. Doppler wasn't infected, just addicted. Or perhaps he was using that antivirus of his to clear the virus out of his systems. He had samples in his lab."

"He might have been going for something stronger," Dr. Cain agreed. "The fact that nanites don't stay in Zero's systems more than a week is probably a very, very good thing."

X nodded, a bit worried. "We have plenty of baselines for my nanite activity before the discovery of the virus. Have you tried putting a sample of the vaccine in with some of them?"

"That was something we did early on, remember? Absolutely no reaction, same as with debris or anything else." It was just something to clean up. "I rechecked with one of the canisters, just to be sure. No movement."

"That's a relief. It looks like batches of the nanites Zero uses can be addicted, however."

"They don't last more than a week, less during wartime. Not to mention that if Zero couldn't handle withdrawal, we'd never have been able to take him off that IV drip." As they got used up, as the level dropped below optimal, it had gotten more painful for him, since he knew what this meant, knew what it did to his head, and it had _terrified_ him. The dread had almost been worse than the hunger. It had been words, not medical technology, that had allowed him to learn how to overcome that.

They all missed Sigma.

"It might be good to find an excuse to drag him into medical for a week for some check-up, though, and see what he does to the vaccine, or vice versa."

"I don't know." X looked rueful. "He's getting really good at avoiding that." Zero _hated _the infirmary, and X couldn't blame him.

* * *

She was so young, bright and lively and delicate like the flower she was named for. He'd been afraid to touch her; afraid she'd break like everything else he touched did. Except X. X was immortal, or so he could tell himself, and that was a relief.

She was so excited by the smallest things, pulling him along eagerly when she fetched him to meet up with Colonel so they could spar, hugging his arm and leaning against his side as easily as her brother's, asking attentive questions and he should answer them, right? Train them so they wouldn't die. Even if they weren't what Dr. Cain had hoped, had promised, that was no reason to make them feel unwanted.

He wasn't good at this, but being around X made them uncomfortable, a reminder of what they couldn't live up to, even though he'd managed to tell them that X made _everyone _feel that way, really, except idiots. If only people who were worthy hung around X, he'd be alone and then he'd be sad, he'd managed to attempt to joke.

Someone had to look after them, for their sake and for X's, and that someone had kind of ended up being him. Dr. Cain didn't have the energy to keep up with these two, and Zero was the one who liked to spar so he would have ended up mentoring Colonel anyway.

She had that way of tilting her head that he did, not prying but just letting you know that he wanted to know, that he wanted to listen to anything you wanted to say. That he actually cared about what went on with you. So it was only natural that he ended up talking to her the way he didn't really talk to anyone except X. And General Sigma, once upon a time.

She listened, and didn't blame him, and said things like, "that must be hard," in a graceless way that worked all the better for it. Stumbling over trying to be like X, the aspect of him that cared for everyone, in the same way that Colonel stumbled over his own two feet sometimes, pushing himself a little too far in training. It was good to push your limits, though, and he liked that they took risks when he was there. It meant they trusted him.

Sure, his unit trusted him now, but it wasn't the same at all. He'd been untouchable because he was a pariah, once. Now he was untouchable because he was a hero. X was another matter, X went out of his way to show that he had feet of clay although, frankly, the things like mercy that people saw and thought were weaknesses that made him human really… weren't.

It was completely missing the point, and he could say things like that to Iris, even though there was a flash of hurt in her eyes when she softly agreed. They hadn't been able to be that strong, and she shouldn't blame herself for it.

So he ended up apologizing, not for the words but for being part of this world that had expected the impossible from her, and she wrapped her arms around him, because she needed a hug, and how could he not give her one?

Her head cradled against his neck, and she'd bit at him and _giggled_.

He'd made a sound that could only really be described as a squawk_, scrambling_ back, and she'd just laughed, delighted with his reaction, so cute with her little button nose and not afraid, not at all. Curious as a monkey, and someone had told her about vampires (he had meant to find out who they were and pin them to something, but totally forgotten about it), and she'd make him a cape when she managed to stop accidently ripping the thread. It had taken her a long time to make that cute little beret, but she wanted to make something for Zero.

She really was like X, with his ability to utterly disarm, utterly overrun anyone with a heart. Only she was more willing to use it, the little minx. Smiling like that should be _cheating_; there should be rules about it.

She'd kissed him on the cheek, which he'd gotten used to, and then on the lips, and …

Nothing more until she'd transferred to Repliforce; he'd managed to enforce that, at least. Nothing else while he was her superior officer, when he was the one who was supposed to protect her. (Someone needed to be able to protect her from him.)

She'd wanted him to, to show that she wasn't afraid (although she said the reason was that it sounded interesting), so in the end he had, holding her, after hopefully managing to put the fear of god into her about telling him if she started to feel ill.

It had flowed into him like a babbling brook, not like a river at all. Swirls and flashes of color, worry and trying to be perfect for him and loving him and being afraid that she wasn't good enough, afraid of the virus, never afraid of him. A flash of pain as he'd bit down harder, at that, so he'd pulled back, trying to apologize, and she'd just kissed him.

She wanted to be together forever, and that was the good part of the stories.

The fantasies.

For awhile, he'd been able to believe in it, he really had, even though he'd never stopped being cautious. When something was really precious then it was hard not to treat it like that. Not because it was breakable, but because the thought of it breaking was so unbearable.

But Iris had been broken before she even opened her eyes for the first time.

Maybe that was why they'd fit so well together, him and her, him and both the shattered pieces of them.

He hadn't been able to keep himself from biting down, cradling her in his arms after she died. Hadn't been able to stop himself from biting his own lip before kissing her one last time, because he'd wanted to believe in those stories.

But Final Weapon was destroyed, and there was no grave for her body to return to him from.

What Sigma showed him was lost in that, really. He couldn't make nanites, so how could he have made the virus, when it was nanites?

Afterwards, though, when X asked Zero to kill him?

* * *

"It's infecting him?" Alia asked, mind reeling as she tried to figure out what they were going to do.

"Worse. Or maybe not." X really didn't like thinking of death as the better option, but in the end, it was. "It's killing him. Or it could."

Zero had barely managed to make it to medical: he'd had to resort to hissing at people who got in his way at the end, according to reports, too far gone for words. He'd ripped the tops off of three containers with his bare hands, hadn't had the coordination to keep himself from getting splattered with the stuff, and ended up throwing himself onto a bed with a fourth one, tossing a sheet over himself to get people to _stop looking_.

It was giving X déjà vu, really.

"He'd get like this sometimes, when he pushed himself too hard. Or got pushed... I'm not worried about what this did, I'm worried about further exposure."

"Dizzy," Zero said in a tone that managed to be spacey and accusatory at the same time.

"It's not just that the new strain makes you dizzy the way it does me that's the problem. I need to examine either your back or your head." X slid the arm he'd been scanning back under the sheet.

Zero's leg kicked in his general direction.

"Do I need to get an IV drip and a second sheet?" Oh, yes. "Lifesaver, would you mind hooking one of the canisters up to an IV drip? Check it first." They hadn't needed to in years, but now that something was actually affecting Zero?

X had already gotten the equipment out and was checking the seal on the lead-lined, nanite killer surgery gloves by the time he finished. "Would all of you mind watching from the observation area? I don't want to risk contamination." Of Zero, but at this point even Signas was starting to worry about contamination _from _Zero_. "_Zero, I need to look at the crystal on your forehead and a few parts in your main body."

"Armor?" A mumble this time.

"See if you can get it off. Buster components too."

The boots were kicked off, again in X's general direction, and Zero tried to take out his buster components. Normally he could do it blindfolded. "Give me that." X took his arm, doing it almost as quickly as Zero did. "If you can't do something, then tell me. You should know it when your coordination goes."

"Dizzy. _Hun_gry." X slid the IV drip into the buster cavity as Zero finished the last word, then snapped it closed.

"Is it that you can't frame sentences, or that you can't calm down and stop being cranky?"

"Stupid Sigmph."

"If that was your best effort, then the answer is both, then. You know how this works, start counting."

"One, two, three…" The words were breathy, and sometimes there were pauses in between as X fiddled with things and ended up sticking a camera under the blanket so it could scan Zero's crystal instead of even asking him to take his head out from under it.

"You can stop counting aloud now. Make sure you don't dislodge that."

There was a nod.

"What did I just say?"

Zero snorted, which made X smile and look up a bit, acknowledging the joke.

After that, he came out to the observation area, and started pulling up several readings. "I changed my mind. I don't think it's a good idea to risk giving him sedatives like this, so I'll have to wait until he's calmed down enough that he can get his systems to shut down."

Signas frowned, spokesman by virtue of seniority. "Can we afford to wait that long?"

"We're going to have to. Without both of us gathering them, we're not going to be able to gather the parts for the cannon idea, especially since Sigma certainly would have thought of that. It's too much like the last war: there's something else going on. Well, unless that's what he wants us to think. Still, running around frantically right now isn't going to do any good at all," he said, watching the clock on the computer screen. When a minute had passed since he put the camera there, he had it take another image and superimposed the two. "Thank goodness." He practically slumped in his chair, seeing that. "The damage isn't spreading, now that it's out of his systems."

"Damage?"

"This chip, and a handful of others, are very important. Without them, he'll die." X started to dig through folders and eventually entered a password, then a few more folders and finally another image of the chip. "Ten percent remodeled, from one exposure. That isn't good."

"It's turning him into a maverick, then?" It was working? What were they going to do? Signas and Alia looked at each other, but neither had an answer.

"No, it's turning him into a walking dead man. This chip, and two others, were installed by Dr. Cain. They're what allow Zero to keep what nanites he has functioning normally. My guess is that the Zero virus is in tune with his systems enough that it's reading the original design template for him instead of our fix. In other words, it's not the virus part that's dangerous. It's the repair nanite aspect. It's trying to take those chips apart and replace them with the design that's supposed to be there. If that happens, it won't just be the virus nanites. Every single nanite introduced into his systems will start trying to restore him to his original design. Including the original design flaw." X had to back up several folders and move to a different area to get a diagram of Zero's full body that wasn't too classified. "When he was brought in, it didn't matter how many nanites were introduced, they all destroyed themselves trying to repair this." He tapped at the touchscreen, magnifying that part. "Essentially, as long as it's non-functional, they'll be tasked to restore it to its original state. The trouble is that the original state was non-functional."

"Infinite loop." Alia nodded.

"But if it actually can repair that part, then it can infect him," Lifesaver pointed out.

"In order to do that, it would have to alter his base template. In order to alter his base template, it would have to infect him." X shook his head. "The key to the box is inside the box, if there is a key at all." He pulled up the camera again. "…_That_ isn't good." He hesitated, then closed everything down except the camera. Lifesaver had his own files on Zero. "The chip isn't being repaired back to the way it was before, even with non-virus nanites in his system." Perhaps there were non-visible changes being repaired first? "Lifesaver, would you mind keeping an eye on him and letting us know if his condition changes?" He couldn't afford to stay here, especially since that kept Signas and Alia tied up looking over his shoulder. "I suppose I can try to get the cannon components." It was better than giving up. "Unless there are any better options?"

There was another option, but it definitely wasn't a better one.


	3. Chapter 3

_Sigma was Dr. Cain's (and X's, in my 'verses) first creation, so I really like the idea of X regarding all reploids as his descendants, yes, but especially Sigma as his child. As for Zero, the beam saber, the way he takes all those shots in the OVA because of what Sigma said? Sigma is definitely an important person to him, and since Sigma spared his life, took him into the hunters, and is his role model? I can see Zero having sort of a gratitude/hero worship/father figure/perhaps even crush feeling towards him. The virus taking him left a big hole in both their lives, one missing a son and the other a father/mentor figure, and that may be part of why their relationship in the series is just so multifaceted. Zero is X's instructor, but then X is the one to go rescue him._

_The reason why some people, even ones who are normally slash fangirls, hate their relationship being written as slash is that there's just so much going on there, it's such a deep bond, that saying it's just romance cheapens it. There's really no word for what Zero is to X besides, 'Zero,' and vice versa. 'Lover' just isn't going to cover it. It's a very equal relationship, with an incredible amount of trust there. The fact that they lose everyone else and the other is the only one they can trust in a very real sense is part of it, but not all of it. They're inter-dependant in a way that could honestly be called codependence if it weren't for the fact that the things they just can't handle without each other are things nobody could handle alone. Given how deep it is, it really seems impossible that X doesn't know, especially after X5. But he's not bringing it up, because this is Zero and he trusts Zero, even with this._

_This actually takes place before the last scene in the last chapter: it's kind of context for what happened in that scene and is going to happen next._

* * *

X was used to Zero coming by. First for check-ups, then to collect him for training, then missions, then one thing or another. It was odd to have Zero visit in the middle of the night, though, but he blinked himself awake, told Zero that of course he could come in and hit the button on the intercom by his bed to open the door.

Zero had crept in and sat down next to X's bed, back leaning against the side of it. X had pulled himself into something of a sitting position, so he leaned over and looked down at him, wondering why Zero had come.

Zero seemed tired, drawn and stressed, and X had to stop himself from asking if Zero had replaced his nanites lately. Zero was a 'grown' hunter now; he knew not to let that slide, no matter how deep in mourning he was. There was a slightly feverish look in his eyes that X associated with longing, and on Zero that look either meant that he needed to eat something or he was thinking about the past, missing the reploid Sigma once had been.

Of course, now he had someone else to miss. Iris.

"There's something I probably should have told you months ago," Zero said, looking up at him. "I just didn't want to know if it was a bad idea. It was Iris' idea, but I'm the one who let her talk me into it."

X would have opened his mouth then to reassure Zero that he'd known that they were having sex and didn't have a problem with it if he hadn't known that Zero would certainly have guessed that X knew and was just not bringing it up for the sake of everyone's dignity. Which meant that whatever this was, it was something more problematic than Zero having a relationship with a rather young former trainee.

It turned out to be something less problematic. "Why did you think you should have told me? There shouldn't be any health risks unless you drained them too far; I could have sworn one of us told you that. You must have known that you weren't hurting her: you wouldn't have done it otherwise."

"Are you sure?" Because Zero wasn't.

X thought the best response to that might be to not dignify it with one. Yes, Zero had killed people that way, but only when he was mad with hunger. Of course he wouldn't do it in his right mind. "Iris did love you. She must have known that it would hurt you if you hurt her. She wouldn't have lied to you about that, or put you in a position where there was too much risk." Well, he certainly hoped not.

That made Zero relax a bit. "I miss her. But sometimes I'm afraid I miss it more."

"It sounds like something very special. To be able to feel flashes of another's mind like that. Anyone would miss having that with someone they loved." There was nothing monstrous about it. "I almost envy you. Maybe I did envy you at the time. It's been years, and I've never felt that way about anyone. She really did just sweep you off your feet." Regardless of which one was the 'male' design. "It was hard to miss how in love with her you were." Zero never had been good at hiding his feelings or expressing them. The awkwardness contrasted with Iris' exuberant affection had been adorable. "I was very happy for you."

And then Iris had, Repliforce had… but she hadn't really understood what she was doing, what they were doing. Even with all the opportunities to learn – no, that wasn't fair. It wasn't something a child should be expected to learn, not so young. Ideally, not ever.

"You've got that look in your eyes: You're blaming yourself again."

"Aren't I to blame?"

"It happened because…" They were young, and scared, and there was the virus. There was always the virus. "None of this was happening before the virus, right? Nothing like this. So the problem isn't your design."

"Correlation does not imply causation."

Zero just shook his head, knowing better than to try to debate anything with X. "You're the one that told me why people want to blame themselves." Because they wanted the power to change what had happened and if it was _their_ fault then it was within their power to fix.

"True. But regardless of whether or not this is my fault, it is my responsibility."

"Why?"

"I suppose…" When everything else was taken away, "because I choose to take responsibility for it."

"You know that you could choose not to?" Zero seemed honestly surprised.

"No. Someone in my position could choose not to take up the responsibility. But _I _can't." Sometimes, out of all of Dr. Light's gifts, his systems, his armors, his name and the infinite potential it described, everything, he thought that the best gift was the half-accidental one. Well, no, it wasn't entirely accidental. If Dr. Light hadn't taken such care to make sure that he would be safe, he wouldn't have survived a century to be found.

Some people thought that he must be jealous of modern reploids, that didn't have to sleep in capsules. Thought that Dr. Light had been 'afraid' and he should resent that fear. While he did wish he could have met his family, there was one good thing about all of how he had come to be.

He knew who he was. There were things that he had learned, rock-solid at the core of him. Not as strong as steel, steel was really rather brittle, but spider-silk, perhaps. Things that bound him together when others flew apart. They didn't know who they were, so how could they know what they were going to do, or needed to do? He knew who he was (X, the infinite potential to be whoever he chose to be), and what he had to do. He doubted his strength, he doubted his wisdom, and he doubted that he was doing the right thing, but he never doubted himself.

Zero had never had that, had always questioned his identity, and it was only after several years that he had started to realize that who he had been didn't really matter. Who he was was who he was. No name or past or power had the ability to change that but him.

Thank goodness.

The virus was a terrible, terrible thing. How were they supposed to discover who they were when it slid that out from under them, pulled them down like quicksand, and they always had to live with that fear? Watched themselves instead of being themselves?

"That's why you're you," was Zero's response, finally. Why he was X instead of Iris.

"You can't choose to do something if you feel that you don't have a choice. She did have a choice." And he'd somehow failed to get the most important part of that across to her. "She chose you. I think she made the right choice, in that. I'm glad that she was happy, that you both were."

Even though now Zero was unhappy, life was made up of moments. In the end, there was only one moment after another, and in this one the room was quiet despite the ticking of the antique clock. Really, the gifts people gave him… at least it wasn't blue. At least the teddy bears were useful, as well as a reminder of the day he'd been woken up. Zero didn't breathe as much as most reploids did, since there was no use in trying to filter water vapor from the air for a reactor he couldn't use, but there was still the hum of system noise, a healthy hum, or as healthy as Zero got.

"I couldn't…"

"She made her choices. That one, I think was a wrong one." She must have known she wouldn't win, but with Colonel dead because he had insisted on being a fool? As for General… "It's not your fault, Zero." He let a hand rest on Zero's shoulder, shifting so that he could prop his head up on his other arm. Ah, so that was why Zero had come by now. He could never manage to show weakness like this in the daylight, or when other people might come in. But here, it was quiet, unless there was an emergency X wasn't going to let anyone else come in (and even then, he'd probably leave instead of meeting them here), and there was a sense of peace.

It let Zero close his eyes, although more of that was the way X's words had hit home than real relaxation. "I didn't deserve her."

"Hmm?" Zero knew that was wrong, or at the very least that X wasn't going to agree.

"That's…" how it feels.

"Do you want to stay?"

Zero looked up at him. What?

"Don't act like I'm going to have you transferred." The idea was ridiculous. "If anything, you have seniority. You're the one who could tell me to take a vacation."

X's general method of dealing with rookies (or sometimes experienced hunters) who had cracked or were on the verge of cracking, unable to take the constant fear anymore, was to get them to calm down (sometimes with sedatives) and take them back to his quarters, where it was safe. This place was defended, and they knew that X couldn't be a maverick. Sometimes, when it was just the day in and day out gnawing fear, that was all it took, that belief (illusion though it was) that there was a place of safety for them to go to. A refuge, and even if they knew that they couldn't really hide here sometimes the idea was enough. The concept that safety was _possible_ and that maybe, maybe someday all the world would be safe: sometimes it gave them a reason to fight, to push past their limits.

A reason to put themselves in terrible danger. A reason to sacrifice themselves. A reason to die.

He often ended up wishing he didn't have to let them go resume their duties, but, still, that was better than a broken child who couldn't do that, who had to get out while there was still a chance they could pull themselves together, build a life and survive somewhere.

"Transfer you back to medical," Zero half-agreed, now that he knew what context to put this in.

Now X was the one who was puzzled: what else could Zero have possibly thought he meant?

Oh, yes. A room, alone, at night, they'd been talking about Iris.

X sighed and lay back in his bed. "That hadn't even occurred to me." He almost had to laugh. "I really am an old maid."

"You should go on a date. It would be worth it just to see the looks on their faces." Despite the words, Zero was really hoping he'd find someone. X had seen that in the units, people who had found partners suddenly trying to set up everyone in their vicinity. Odd that Zero hadn't started until he'd lost his, although while Iris was there he'd had the emotional energy for little besides this immense, precious thing that had fallen into his arms and he had no idea what to do with. X certainly hadn't felt neglected or bored. No, far from bored_. _

"With who?" The question was only half-serious.

"Alia?" Zero didn't even have to think, but then this was just brainstorming.

Well… "She's a very nice girl."

"But she's a little girl? Iris was young. I wasn't there when she was turned on, but the next thing to it."

"I wouldn't feel…"

"_I_ didn't feel right about it, either, and you didn't say anything."

Maybe X should have, given how it had turned out, but they'd been so happy. It had been wonderful to see, the dream of a happily ever after for one of them. "I think that if it was someone younger, it would have to be their idea."

"You turn _them_ down too, though." The starry-eyed rookies.

"Yes, because the whole idea is rather silly. The only ones who ask are the ones who don't know me, they think they know, and already love, someone who exists only in their heads. I don't want to ruin their illusions."

"Someone who knows you, knows what they want, and is the one to suggest it because it would never occur to you." Zero tilted his head back, turning it to look up the bed at him. "Well, no wonder then."

"Signas is Dr. Cain's last creation." His nephew, not that he'd bring that up in front of officers. Chain of command was important, after all. "Douglas and Lifesaver have rather narrow interests, and Alia has a boyfriend."

"Oh?" That hadn't been part of the gossip Iris had chattered with him about.

"It's… long distance." With teleportation, that had become code for top-secret, hidden away, someone or some project trying to stay safe.

"What about a human? Dr. Cain?"

Ok, that joke managed to make X laugh out loud. "Don't even say that in his hearing, he can only take so many more heart attacks," he managed to say between chuckles. Actually, that was one thing Dr. Cain _didn't _have to worry about: an artificial one had been installed decades ago.

Zero smirked, made an amused noise, and eventually gave in and joined in.

Dr. Cain was more like a foster father, or older brother to him, and seeing the man so old made him feel old, made him realize how unfair it was that he could be this old and look so young as the human wasted away. As the young ones died.

"I needed that," Zero admitted.

"Yes." He reached over to put a hand on top of Zero's head, just contact. He could have asked what Zero wanted to do now, or if he was going to go, but sometimes people needed to be pushed into saying what they needed to say and letting you know what they needed to hear, and sometimes if you pushed they'd clam up. He didn't mind waiting, just being here. It was a useful thing to do, and, "I needed it too. Thank you for coming."

"Don't you want to talk about your feelings now?"

"To make it fair? To who?"

"You don't tell people what your troubles are."

"Sometimes… no one's perfect. Sometimes it inspires people to see that someone they idolize is a person, just like them. It means that they can get that far, and that they aren't weak for letting it get to them. Everyone has moments of weakness. Sometimes, it inspires people to seem strong, unhurt, so that they can imagine that if they only manage to get rid of their own weakness it will stop hurting, they'll have all the answers." Except that, "Everyone knows what my troubles are, really. That I hate killing. That I hate failing to save them." That it hurt.

"You're sad they died too."

"I want to ask myself where I went wrong," that they would do something like that. "But very often, no matter what I do, it won't help and wouldn't have helped. I have to accept that, but I can't. Just like I had to save them, but I couldn't."

"Speaking of saving people, don't ask me to kill you again. Ever again. There are… I'd do whatever you ask me to, but don't ask me again."

X had already asked, so Zero would do it, but there were some things that people couldn't bear to hear.

"It was weak of me to put that on you. Weak of me to give into my own pain when I knew how much you were in." Selfish of him, so incredibly selfish.

"You aren't going to die before I do. Before, before it happened, he asked me to keep an eye on you." Sigma had trusted Zero with X's, his father's, training. His safety. Zero's eyes were clouded for a moment, and then widened slightly, as though he had realized something. "That can't be, no. No." It couldn't be. Zero relaxed a bit again.

Sigma could have told Zero to keep an eye on X, have been setting him up to kill X all along, if the memory he had seen at the end of their battle was a true one. But that just couldn't be true, it couldn't, so that meant that Sigma hadn't been infected then, which meant that Zero hadn't infected him during their battle. So he really had known the real Sigma, and he wasn't the source, it had all been a trick. Had to be.

"Hmm?"

"It's nothing."

"You can stay, if you like." X tilted his head. "Actually, it does sound interesting."

"What?"

"I wonder how mine would compare to Iris'?" The data probably wouldn't be very useful, but he was curious now.

"Are you suggesting…?"

"Is it someone you don't want to do except with a lover?"

"Ok, now I know you're not suggesting… that."

"Obviously not. I'm not Iris. I can't take her place any more than she could take mine." It was impossible: people were individuals, each one precious and irreplaceable. X tilted his hand, showing Zero his wrist.

Repair nanites were thick in the central processor, and up and down the 'spine,' checking on it and ready to transmit the data themselves if there was a problem. The padding/insulation that approximated 'skin' tended to have minute holes to allow them to examine not only it but the armor's systems: it was a _bad _idea to have wires from the armor hooked up to the internal systems, so nanites carried what sensory data armor took in to the body and instructions out to it from the body. Unless there was an injury or something was receiving heavy use (like a buster in combat), there weren't many in any particular area along most of the 'skin.'

The only areas besides the head and neck where there were lots of accessible nanites (and the head had another layer of internal armor, as a rule, which was why Zero had gone for the neck as an irregular), were the hands and feet, because of how important the data they collected, the orders sent to them, and their working order was. They both had internal structural supports, to make seriously damaging them by altering their shape harder, so the wrist and ankle were better for Zero's purposes. If nanites were drained from there, the body would replace them almost as urgently as ones headed for the central processor, too.

"You don't have to," X assured him. "I know how you feel about people bothering you about this. I don't want you to feel like this is just an experiment or just because I'm curious. I am curious," he was a scientist, after all, "but I want to find out what this is like because it's you, and I want to see if this will let you understand my feelings." So Zero wouldn't feel alone, wouldn't have to worry.

It probably wouldn't work that way, it would be too convenient. "My nanites are rather peculiar and particular, so it might not work, but they shouldn't damage you."

"Of course not, they're yours." Zero wasn't going to ask if X was sure, X wouldn't have offered unless he was sure, but he did take X's wrist, wait a beat, press his lips to it, wait another beat, set teeth to it, giving X chances to back out.

That proved that yes, he was in control even when doing this.

There was a brief pain, and then the awareness that there was a wound and X's nanites were being drained away. His system queried him as to whether or not he wanted to shut off the flow to that point until whatever was preventing them from working was dealt with: he increased the flow instead. There weren't any odd sensations or foreign matter entering through the wound: Zero definitely wasn't poisonous, although he did have to wonder what you'd use to poison a reploid. Acid? Or hostile nanites, something like the bite of the extinct Komodo Dragon?

The virus?

But by now, he recognized it. Either Zero really had nothing to do with the virus, or he hadn't been designed to infect this way. He certainly hadn't been designed to _be _this way, unless his builder had _wanted_ people to think of demons, vampires and other myths.

He really shouldn't be thinking like a scientist right now. If Zero _was _picking anything up, he was probably worrying him.

Zero seemed to have picked up on that flash of apology, because he pulled back, allowing the wound to knit shut, and shook his head. "It's ok. You're kind of… peaceful."

That made X chuckle.

"Right, no one would need this to know that about you." Zero tilted his head to lie against X's hand. "It's peaceful here, too."

"You can stay as long as you like. Just try not to dent the bed." Zero was leaning against the side of it, and if he made any sudden movements without thinking? "It's hardwood, but you're metal." He'd tell Zero to take his armor off, but this was Zero, who never, ever did that if he could help it. There _were _health reasons why not: the metal helped keep ultraviolet and _some_ other radiation from reaching nanite-heavy areas, but the main reason was paranoia. He wasn't going to tell Zero to do something that would make him feel unsafe when he was trying to get him to relax for a bit.

Feeling Zero nod, he wished him goodnight and went back to sleep. He wished that Zero could fall asleep here, but his ability to do that normally, without a sleep capsule, was one more thing they hadn't been able to fix.

X had expected that someone would notice Zero's presence, and almost thought it would be funny if anyone did draw the wrong conclusions, but Zero was known for keeping irregular hours (mostly caused by skimping on sleep in favor of training until he absolutely _had _to in order to stay in combat-worthy shape), and the odds that someone would see him and realize where he was going or coming from were rather low.

So nothing really happened because of that night, and their friendship didn't change because of it. Even though Zero hadn't asked him those questions before or taken him up on his subtle offers of a listening ear, he'd already known what the answers would be, already known that X would be happy to listen, just as X had known that Zero wouldn't hurt him, no matter who he was or how defenseless X was.

The fact that neither of them felt relieved was a good thing: it showed that they hadn't needed any proof besides that they already had.

So, things went on, the same as always, and X wouldn't have minded that except the same as always meant yet another war.

A war in which Sigma's clear objective was to infect or kill Zero.


	4. Chapter 4

_There's an absolutely horrifying plot twist in Simon R. Green's _Blue Moon Rising_ (Lovecraftian horror in a fantasy setting) that there's a shout-out to in here. It's a very bad idea to use cannon fodder to fight something that raises the dead. It's kind of like saying, 'here, free reinforcements!'_

_Infodump ahoy. If the sci-fi spec with how to do vampires and zombies among reploids isn't your cup of tea, skip to the second section. I'd cut it, except when I divided the fic into chapters, this chapter ended up short because the scene before and scene after were massive and couldn't be divided up, and taking out the speccy bit would just make it way too short. Also, worldbuilding and magical realism are major Author Appeal for me, if you hadn't figured that out. _

* * *

One of the many things that made it difficult to learn the secrets of the virus or discover who had already been suborned, infected by it when they gave off no virus readings was that no one knew that there were two types of mavericks.

The virus, when it infected someone, got into their head, decreased their willpower, made them more… amenable to what it was trying to do. And more violent, although that was regarded as just 'getting used to it' in a military group like the hunters, and always passed undetected. On top of that, the virus was able to make them crave more of it. Among humans, drugs made physical changes to the brain and convinced the body's survival programming that the drug belonged there, was a necessity. Even if their conscious mind decided they didn't want it anymore, their body would punish them for doing something counter-survival, constantly craving, constantly trying to wear them down so they would give in. With tobacco, for example, the calm, pleasant sensation wasn't caused by the nicotine. It was caused by the body being sated and ceasing to crave nicotine – for now.

When the virus was associated, on the subconscious level, with good things, then it was more easily able to imprint its messages. The victim would want to seek out the virus, want to join the mavericks, because there would be virus there. Little subtle things, tweaked so expertly in ways a sane person would never have thought up, were able to gradually take control of a race meant to be immune to reprogramming.

Just not immune enough to outwit Dr. Wily.

So while the Maverick Hunters had plenty of gear to detect the virus, it failed to detect mavericks among their ranks, like Double. So Repliforce being clean didn't actually mean anything, and paranoia reigned. Someone could be completely brainwashed, completely indoctrinated, and pass completely undetected.

Sometimes, even once they had become addicted, someone could realize what was happening and try to fight it. But not for long. Never for long, because every second it would gnaw at them, make them long to return to the Maverick fold, where the virus made everything simple.

Most newbuilt reploids didn't even have the self-awareness to look at themselves and realize that this wasn't right, to surface from the haze even for an instant. Most of those that did just let it drag them back under, because it was easier and because they didn't want to die.

Some decided that they weren't _that _attached to their lives. Dr. Doppler had helped to defeat Sigma. Quite a few of the hunters who died on routine patrol, or in battle, hadn't been killed by mavericks but chosen to end it there, so no one had to know how far they had fallen. So they could die a hunter instead of a maverick.

More often, a hunter went out and when they were next seen they were a maverick, body swarming with the virus.

Researchers had assumed that it worked like an organic virus, which could rampage through the body and show obvious signs, yes, but also lurk undetected until it was time. Sometimes doctors would think a virus had been beaten, and then find it lurking somewhere undetected, showing no symptoms. Carriers like the famous Typhoid Mary were asymptomatic, for example.

Infectees went to Sigma, went to a place where the virus was thick, and there they were killed, either by the mavericks or by the kind of thick concentration of the virus that made X sick. Then, with no native nanites or active defenses to oppose the virus, it rewrote them, changed them so that all the nanites they produced were virus, to infect others.

Sometimes it could do the same thing to the newly-dead bodies of reploids who had never been infected, although that wasn't as likely to work. Sometimes the hunters who had been sent to an area to kill mavericks rose again, if their bodies weren't removed in time.

The most effective way of ensuring the change was successful? To drain them of their own nanites beforehand, so that their body would draw in the virus on its own.

* * *

If any other reploid had been invaded by this much of the virus, it would have been able to convince them that they were enjoying it. Hacked their value & pleasure/pain system so that this felt better than anything else ever could, made them shudder in ecstasy and cry out for more.

X knew himself too well to be tricked like that, had too much self-control to be manipulated like that.

It wasn't actively painful, since it wasn't causing damage to his systems, but the attempts to disrupt them made him feel scrambled and nauseous. His body shook from aborted jumbles of signals, tatters of attempts to struggle, to break loose and fight. He refused to cry out in pain or confusion, but the desire for it to _stop_ overrode almost all else.

It had to stop soon, because he barely had any resources left to produce more of his own nanites with, and before much longer he'd have to make the choice between shutting down all his peripheral systems, which would make it almost impossible to break free, or letting the virus, thinking it was camouflaged as normal nanites, take over running them for him so that he still had enough of his own to think with.

It was hard to think, with the disorientation, nausea, all the signals from his systems that something was _wrong_, make it stop!

That, and barely half of his nanites, replacements and ones sent out to his body alike, were getting past the mouth clamped around his neck.

He couldn't die here, he couldn't let _Zero _be the one to kill him, because then if Zero ever woke up again he'd never forgive himself. At least he mercifully had no memories of the first rampage? But just like there had been some camera footage of that, those now watching knew, and would tell him what had happened. "Zero, you have to…" What he sent to his vocal cords especially kept getting drained away, since they stayed in his neck. "Wake up, there are enough nanites here," to make it possible, even without his. "Zero…"

Since struggling to get away just made Zero growl and cling tighter, perhaps reaching up to touch him without attacking might be confusing enough to get higher functions activated? X tried reaching up and behind him, touching where Zero's ponytail came out of his helmet. Zero had managed to pounce on him from behind after X had gritted his teeth and decided that there wasn't any way past a certain clump of virus but _through_ it. Zero had ambushed him in the middle of it, and with that all around there really wasn't any way to break an expert hold, especially with his strength draining away like this.

"Zero, please, wake up?" Gentle and non-threatening, he told himself. Although it would have been hard to sound threatening like this. There was the chance his words could get through to Zero, there was also the chance that acting oddly might get the tactical AI to wake him up.

There wasn't much time left. Letting the virus maintain his outer systems wouldn't help. Even if it didn't make his skin crawl, it still wouldn't allow him to break free. "If you remember this after you wake up," no, shorter messages. "Controlled shut-down."

That was probably the only way. If he could trick the AI into thinking that there wasn't anything left to drain, then he'd end up unconscious in a clump of virus in the middle of enemy territory, yes, but unconscious and revivable was preferable to _dead_.

He managed to pat Zero on the back of the head a bit. "Not your fault."

* * *

This wasn't working at _all_.

There just wasn't one single, solitary opening for him to take advantage of.

X had been designed to function as an individual. A pseudo-human, as the name android implied. A lot of early android concepts weren't even robots, they were what 20XX people would have referred to as clones. Artificially-produced humans. And, to be fair, Dr. Light had succeeded in that remarkably well, as disgusting as Dr. Wily had found that. Figuring out a valid reason to have pseudo-skin, for one thing. Normally, it was Dr. Wily who was the physical design genius, but just having a layer like this, just being able to have an interruption, a layer of insulation against blasts, shocks, and many other weapons between their armor and internal systems, would have _greatly_ increased the defenses of his robot masters. Sadly, since they needed to have those wires running everywhere, it just wouldn't work for them.

With the exception of DWN.024, but that was only because he could use his unique system to create pseudo-nanites. Theoretically. Dr. Wily hadn't ordered him to experiment, since by that point it had become very clear that Dr. Wily's second favorite creation (soon to be third-favorite) was also a traitor.

It appeared that humans did so many things on the single-cell level instead of having them all networked like the nervous system (which itself was made up of individual cells instead of one big linked one, which there was precedent for in other living creatures) for valid reasons. Increased flexibility, increased disease resistance, increased…

In the end, robot masters had paid for their lack of real diversity and internal division: like the cheetah, one plague had been enough to wipe them out.

Dr. Wily had felt that if the extermination of his creations was inevitable, then better at the hands of another creation than of humanity.

He had designed his greatest creation by taking Dr. Light's flash of genius, or rather insight into what to copy, and running with it.

Omega should have been greater than X ever would be. He had the capability to control and design nanites instead of just use and fine-tune them. He should be able to run rings around his defenses. His nanites should have been superior, and able to use that to push X's out, make his systems reliant on him.

Instead he was coming to the rather galling realization that _X was more advanced than he was_.

His father's body must be spinning in the wreckage.

Not because of Dr. Light's design, no. At least there was that. It was probably because of that century X had spent in hibernation while Omega was dead. No wonder the modern inferior scientists weren't able to make anything like X from Dr. Light's plans. He had spent a century with nothing else to do but experience 'ethical simulations' (Dr. Wily had read that as 'brainwashing') and fiddle with things.

He'd allowed the nanites he'd drained from X loose in his systems like any other reploid's, just to see what they would do and to study their vulnerabilities. Normally, with stolen nanites he had to impose a copy of his own plans on them so that they wouldn't try to turn his systems into a copy of some inferior reploid's. X's were too well-behaved for that, which was a good thing because _he wasn't able to affect them. _At all.

Their protections against mutating and altering anything that wasn't X or being hacked could practically ignore his best attempts. He could _destroy _the things, but he couldn't even tear them apart and reassemble them slightly differently without the things breaking down.

Also, they were tiding up his systems. And submitting what could only be described as a _shopping list_. Sure, that was probably a better way of handling materials requirements than constant irritating alerts, but a _shopping list_? Not to mention what did he need with selenium? Tungsten he could understand, but did X _really_ use such specific materials and minerals?

Well, extensive testing on not just optimal design but optimal construction materials would explain some of the performance data.

If this had been a family trait, no wonder it had made his father tear his hair out. He was the one who had been designed to be great, designed to win, and here X was…

Being very, very good at what _he _had been designed for: functioning as an individual unit and protecting his individuality.

Damn.

It would have been slightly better if he wasn't being so nice about it. X being nice about it to 'Zero' was a good thing, it showed that the deception was working and X still had no idea that he wasn't operating on AI, but X certainly had the ability to destroy his nanites instead of letting Zero take them. He wasn't, because he thought Zero needed them and didn't even have the grace to resent being killed for them. It was hard to see someone as an enemy when they were clearly a nice person down to their bones. No, on the pseudo-cellular level.

Every fiber of their body, to use another human-derived metaphor.

He really should hate what Dr. Light had done, building a free-willed android only to succeed so deeply in brainwashing it, just as he'd designed the first sentient robot only to bind it at the very root to serve man or die, but the result was hard to argue with.

Just like his older siblings hadn't been able to truly fight Rock? No! He wasn't that weak! He'd done what they hadn't had the courage and conviction to do!

One good thing had come out of this fiasco: The Lightbot trusted him, without any doubts, because 'he' had spent years being that trustworthy. Not knowing his true nature, he'd stood by X's side and protected reploids, as he had been designed to do, even if he'd forgotten what the only way to protect them really was.

To eliminate humanity.

The irony of it all, a human and a Lightbot working together to save him all those years ago. The one who had already sown the seeds of their destruction. Twice over.

He _still _couldn't generate any nanites, even after falling here and being restored and revived by the virus, and for some reason just being _near _a fusion reaction caused his body to start falling apart, but that was alright. There was enough virus here, enough power in the air, that he didn't need to make his own nanites or energy, so he'd just told his body to stop trying to heal, and that stopped the constant drain that had made him ravenous before.

X had assumed that Zero was operating on AI and attacked because he was hungry, and Omega hadn't done anything to disabuse him of the notion. The Lightbot hadn't even seriously tried to kill him. Well, to be fair, perhaps he had known that wouldn't work. X might have efficient systems, but Omega had every tactical advantage and was the true warbot here. In that area, he knew he was the superior model. Even Zero was better at unarmed combat than X, and Omega had ambushed him in a way that rendered his weapons useless.

It was best to be cautious when dealing with Lightbots.

With what X knew, shutting down was a clever idea.

Hmm. His options were to finish him off while he lay there helpless, or…

* * *

_Despite my attempt to write cheerful crack, vampire tropes just made this fic crash right into the big question of my Rockman work even faster. With vampires, the options are: allow the vampire to live and permit the killing to continue, allow it to live but stop the killing (taking the third option, yes, but never an easy one and often it just doesn't work, as in Twilight), or kill the vampire. In my RM fic, it's the two questions of humanity's inherent/instinctive tendency towards logic fails & the virus, options being to destroy the virus and allow whatever happens to reploids to happen (Zero series, anyone?), let the virus win (Logical Impossibility), or trying to cause humanity and the virus, or the potential for the virus in the form of Omega, to coexist (Checkmate, Innocent Sin as the opposite of Checkmate, and this other fic I still need to write that kind of takes a middle road)._

_With the whole 'when the master vampire dies, the others return to normal' thing in play, Zero's set up to get X to kill him, which is not good since he's still the suicidal bastard we all know and fangirl/boy. The only way to prevent the damn thing from having an instant bad ending at that point is to let Omega take over to buy time. It's interesting how often I use Zero's Superpowered Evil Side as a means to avoid having an automatic downer ending. RMX had one overall, and all the different scenarios in RMX5 all ended up downer endings, meaning that AU isn't an automatic fix. Changing one thing doesn't change the other reasons, the factors, and it's a fairly deterministic story, heavy on fate and things running to foreordained conclusions not because of a supernatural power but as a natural consequence of things that can't be changed._


	5. Chapter 5

_Long, and I really do need to put in the 'he said she said,' over and over again stuff, for ease of reading. I do put cues and clues in, but it does disrupt the reader's concentration if they have to think in order to notice those indications of who is talking._

* * *

X started to wake up when the amount of his own nanites in his system started to increase and the amount of virus in the vicinity… actually wasn't decreasing, it was just being moved. There were still teeth in his neck, but it was mainly the virus that was flowing out of his body. An open wound was pressed to his mouth, so the obvious assumption was that Zero had woken up and was trying to undo the damage.

Zero?

It was too quiet. Zero would have been going frantic if he woke up to find that he'd nearly killed X. The normally stoic hunter should have been talking to X, to himself, thinking aloud. Hoping he was doing it right, saying that with his luck he probably wasn't, trying to put together what had happened and so on. Reploids didn't actually need to breathe to speak, so the fact his mouth was occupied wouldn't prevent him, and Zero's systems were too quiet: he couldn't be on high alert.

Zero would be quiet if there were others present, but X knew this wasn't headquarters. There was too much virus for anyone who wasn't a maverick to be safely present, and there wasn't the distinctive hum of signal jammers and all the other security measures.

X often wished he was a better liar. The fact that Zero was giving someone else nanites meant that the lights were on in his head. That he was no longer running on instinct and hunger, but there was thinking going on, and a will strong enough to resist that hunger. Or turn it off.

It was Zero, or a good copy of his body at least. He was very distinctive, which was why the Zero virus' readings had been instantly recognizable as his. There was someone in Zero's head who didn't think like Zero. The lights were on and someone else was home.

He hoped he was wrong. Perhaps Zero's vocal cords had been smashed, or he was trying to keep any mavericks that might still be nearby from finding out where they were while X was incapacitated. Perhaps this was another copy.

He'd still be a bundle of nervous energy if that were the case. Everything revved up and ready to move, perhaps even holding a charged shot ready. Zero had been the one to teach X what precautions to take, dealing with an injured hunter who might wake up delirious (if not maverick) in enemy territory.

No: there was a fair amount of system noise, indicating an alert state, but a low-level one. Zero would _never _assign an area like this a low threat level, especially with Sigma nearby, X to guard and his own body severely altered by the crash and the virus. Zero knew better than to take his systems for granted, especially when something changed and he had to adjust.

There might still be another explanation, but X really couldn't think of one.

What made mavericks so hard to spot was that they weren't an imposter, they _were _the original person, just altered. So they knew how they would have acted in a given situation. If Zero really had fallen to the virus, then X wouldn't have been able to figure it out so soon. Zero might even have been more nervous than normal, between trying to act the way he would in a situation like this and the worry that X might spot him. Zero really couldn't act, and just trying would have made him nervous.

Had the Zero that jumped him been a copy, like the one that had been built during the second war?

"Playing possum? I guess I trained you well," 'Zero' murmured into his neck.

That? Was a terrible attempt to act like Zero. Zero _had _told X that there were some times that it was a good idea to go down and make it look like you were going to actually stay down, but that had been when he was training X as an Irregular Hunter. Mavericks, unlike insane irregulars, weren't going to fall for that, or rather they had orders from Sigma to make _sure _of him.

Zero, the Zero he'd known for years, would have told him that it was definitely not the time to play possum, especially since Zero would have been both worried and hurt that X thought he might be an enemy.

X opened his eyes, carefully pushed the other's head away from his neck and looked up into green ones. Zero's eyes changed color depending on the light and to some degree his mood at the time. Green confirmed what X already knew. Whoever this was, they were _too calm_.

"Are you alright? Aren't you hungry?" He reached up to 'Zero's' forehead, noticing that not only was the chip entirely redesigned (once his optics compensated for the translucent crystal), but there was the subtle outline of an emblem in it.

An emblem he knew very well from the research he had done on his family.

It made him a little sad that he wasn't surprised.

Zero shook his head. "There's enough virus here that I could use it to think with, and once I could think, I could tell my systems to stop trying to repair those three systems." His nanite-production, fusion generator, and external radiation shielding.

"So your body's been restored, or mostly restored, to the way it was before, and you're able to exert normal control over it?" He tried to sound upbeat, but he wasn't able to add, 'That's wonderful!' to the end of that statement. He still managed to smile.

Zero nodded.

Another reason this person couldn't be Zero was that they were observing him. Zero would have been watching him closely right now, yes, but that would have been because he was worried about him. For instance, as X stood up this Zero just stood up as well, instead of first asking if he had balance control back yet and then helping him up. Not to mention that Zero would have been watching him for injuries, and _possibly _signs that he might have gone maverick, while this person was just sort of studying him.

Zero didn't study people or peoplewatch, which was part of why he was hopeless when it came to dealing with them. While there were many people that Zero would benefit from watching and trying to figure out, X wasn't one of them. Zero knew how X worked (except for the technical parts, of course). He knew how X thought, even though his reaction to it was a combination of disbelief, irritation and a fondness for it that was mainly due to how long X had been that way. It was something familiar, after all.

X dusted himself off, checked weapon and armor readiness states in a way that had become reflexive, hid a grimace at how low his energy reserves were, and turned to look around. He didn't need to ask how much time had been lost, he had an internal clock.

Should he go on to face Sigma or deal with this now?

This Zero might even help against Sigma, to try to continue the deception… or he might shoot X in the back while he was occupied.

"Tired?" Zero asked, stepping up next to him.

"I'll be fine." He would be because he had to be. "Don't worry."

"I can, I think I can… give you energy? And I've still got some of your nanites." The imposter offered.

"You can drain energy carriers out of nanites and transfer them to someone else?"

"I think so."

"It might be better to just keep going and hope I can find something." He didn't want an unknown quantity introducing foreign materials to his systems.

"Are you sure?" This person wasn't going to push it. Zero, on the other hand, would be trying to argue X into letting him, trying to make up for draining X this low in the first place.

Deciding to stop putting it off, X raised an eyebrow. "While people often say I'm too trusting, I _do_ know better than to take candy from strangers, Mister…?"

An instant of that poker face was enough to prove it. Zero would have been shocked and hurt. He wouldn't have pulled back for an instant to decide what to do… and then started to laugh quietly. "How did you figure it out?"

"It was rather obvious." Did whoever this was _really_ think X was going to tell him where he'd messed up, when he might use that to do a better Zero impression next time? "You're not even a maverick version of him." Although X certainly wasn't going to rule out the idea that he was a maverick. Who else would be here, deep in Sigma's territory? Not to mention that the last fake Zero had been built by Sigma.

"Right. I'm the original personality. I got booted up instead of him when Tactical didn't know what to do with someone not functioning but not actually being dead. I have access to his memories, but I'm not him, even though I_ was_ him."

"Someone's personality is the combination of their starting point and their formative memories. You should still have the same core as Zero, if what you say is true, so the fact that you're so different from him implies that you have other memories, am I correct?" To outweigh Zero's years and traumas, they would either have to be very numerous… or very strong. Very formative?

Whoever this was would have to be _very_ set in their ways, to act so differently from how they had spent the past several years acting. Perhaps even on X's level.

The symbol was proof that might be the case.

The other Zero nodded.

Speaking of which, "Sorry, where are my manners? My name is X, although you already know that, but what's yours? I can't call you 'the other Zero' after all."

"Actually, Zero is my name." He tapped the Z on one shoulder. "Or half- No, a third of it."

"And the other two-thirds?" X bet he could guess at one of them. "Your builder's name, and…"

Another one of those looks. "You already know, don't you. No. You already _knew_." Had known even before this happened. Now he was _really_ watching X like a puzzle he needed to figure out, starting to walk around him as though that would help.

X turned slowly, not letting the other get behind him. "Well, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, then yes. If not, then no."

"How long have you known? And how?" Omega knew that Sigma had destroyed any evidence, not that there had been much besides the emblem on his forehead, and that only showed up when the crystal was activated.

"Well, I still don't _know_, since I don't know if we're talking about the same thing." But X would be prepared to bet on it.

"Impressive," the other murmured. "Ah! That's it." The question of what the big difference that X had detected was had been bugging him. "I wouldn't be worried about your condition even if I thought exactly the way Zero did, because I can read it. The big difference, the main difference, is that he cares what you think. He wants to be forgiven," and there was an echo of that pain in the other's eyes now. "And you've managed to convince him that it's possible. So he'd be apologizing for nearly killing you, am I right? Wanting to convince you, and himself, that he wouldn't kill you, that he's, we're, not a killer."

"That's part of it." But not the most important thing. Really, it was more likely that Zero would be trying to do whatever he could to fix things to the point of fussing, hoping that X would say he was wrong but not actually daring to ask. An apology was a question, in Zero's mind. Would it be accepted or not? And he wouldn't want it to be rejected. "You don't think that I'll forgive you?"

"No." Of course not. "I shouldn't be forgiven. There would be something wrong with a world that would forgive me."

X felt a sadly familiar sense of settling inside his chest. The knowledge that something was necessary, and so he must do it, no matter how heavy it made his heart. "You're not talking about the rampage, are you." No.

"That, I _will _apologize for. It was an accident. I didn't know those were reploids: my tactical AI assumed they were robot drones. When I realized that I was killing people, I managed to stop and started to self-destruct since there wasn't any other way out of that situation."

Just reploids? There was no way an expertly programmed AI would mistake humans for dogs, or anything nonsensical like that. "You didn't think that you were killing _people_."

"I've killed people before, because it was necessary. They couldn't stop fighting me, either because they didn't have a choice in the matter or because of… who and how they were. That was war. There's a difference between that and murdering innocent people."

X had to take a moment to prepare himself, both mentally and physically, before he asked the next question. "So what do you consider killing humans, then?"

He wished he didn't already know the answer.

He wished the other Zero had needed to think about his answer, had been willing to think about what he was doing, instead of saying just a single word: "Necessary."

When X had nothing but silence to say to that, Zero continued after a moment. "The virus taking the form it did was an accident. I meant for all the blood to be on my hands." For the new world to be blameless, a peaceful Elysium that could regret the loss of their parent race and never have to face the fact that they had been created by animals that would have consumed their lives instead of people they could be proud of.

"And yet you were trying to infect me, weren't you?" To use him to kill still more innocents.

"Yes. You _are _the last Lightbot. I wanted to make sure that you stayed out of my way. Somewhere you would be safe." The other examined him again, seemingly admiringly. "I don't like that he tried to ensure that you would come out brainwashed, but it's hard to argue with a result like this. I should have put you higher on the priority list. If I'd taken you back then… But you've done fairly well for yourself."

"Everything was going well," true. "Until." Until the virus. "Somehow, doing all of this in order to take over the world would be far less evil." If the other was doing this out of ambition instead of a sense of misguided… X wished he could say this was insanity alone. "Dr. Wily was a madman, yes, but did he tell you to wipe out the rest of his species or was it your own idea?"

The other's eyes flashed. "Don't insult my father. It wasn't 'the rest of.' He knew what was necessary."

"I'm sorry," was the only thing X could say to that. Both that he'd been forced to kill his own father, and that he'd had that little chance to realize that what he was doing was wrong. He'd been a newbuilt, this was his own father, and once someone killed, there was a temptation to insist that it was justified because the alternative was to admit that they'd done something evil. X knew that trap was there, and he'd _never _let himself think that it was alright to kill. The fact that sometimes there was no alternative, or at least no lesser evil, didn't make it _right. _

'Zero' just snorted. "You _should _be."

The uneasy stalemate continued, and X could dimly see the virus start flowing into Zero's body again: what did he need that many nanites for? Even if he'd given some of X's back?

X still wasn't operating at anything near a hundred percent, and his energy reserves _were _low. His usual weapon was his buster, but that cost too much energy per shot, and Zero was the unarmed combat instructor for a reason. And that was if this Zero couldn't just swarm him with the virus again, if he really could get the nanites to go where he wanted. Even if he was only summoning them to his body, if X tried to close with him then he would get hit with them as well.

He had to figure something out, or else he had no chance of winning, and the fact this Zero thought X was outmatched was probably the only reason he hadn't attacked and taken him out yet. After all, it had been so easy for him to do it the last time.

X's Zero would have known better than to give him time to think. There had to be _something_.

Actually…

Zero's memories couldn't be as integrated as the other person said. Zero must have been completed after X was, and the Cataclysm hadn't happened that long after that. So, Zero _must_ have spent more time living in the world as Zero than as this person. True, hibernation strengthened a personality, but the fixes X and Cain had applied wouldn't have done anything to Zero's personality. So, Zero might not be the original personality, the one he'd had back then, but he might be the older one in terms of not just life experience, but… total duration. Time spent dealing with the world. And if the only difference between the two was memories…

So, this Zero might be who he'd been as a newbuilt with the virus? Even if it might be a different virus. He was acting far saner than any maverick, even if it was a cold, dark… _wrong_ kind of sanity. The virus kept them from really understanding what they were doing, made them run on ideology and feelings instead of asking questions. This Zero _had _thought about what he was doing. _Was _rational, and had still done it. Was still going to do it.

X couldn't understand that. He didn't _want _to.

Insanity seemed a far less vile madness than this. Insanity was a sickness: this was just _sick_.

He wanted to shake his head and deny that something like this could exist, but that wouldn't make it stop existing. He needed a plan to do that, not just a wish.

Find some way to wake up his Zero's personality? There wasn't anything but the virus capable of interfering on that level.

He couldn't give up. So he had to stall for time. "What are you going to do now?"

"Finish winning." Wasn't that obvious?

Atmospheric virus that this Zero could theoretically control, an army of mavericks that he could if Sigma could? Yes, he was very, very close to victory. Disabling Sigma and leaving that army without a leader long enough to destroy most of it had been the only real chance the Hunters had, after Eurasia fell.

Sigma. "You can return, can't you? The way Sigma did."

"Yes," he said, and smirked. "Kill me, and I'll just rise again."

"Is that why you can't make conventional nanites? You're supposed to rely on the virus?"

He scowled. "I was supposed to _make _virus. I don't know what went wrong: everything was working fine back then. No matter what I do, it just won't work." It wasn't making any sense whatsoever.

Because he was immune? Because some part of him was determined to reject the virus and _stay _immune? Maybe he had been doing it to himself, all along? X wasn't going to suggest that to this Zero, because once he knew the problem he might be able to fix it, and that was the last thing X wanted.

Now, anyway.

"Then why even try to pretend that you were still my Zero?" What would he have gained from that, if he were so close?

"_Your_ Zero?" This one laughed. "I suppose that's not a bad description. I don't want to kill people," as opposed to humans, "I'm not a complete monster, but I especially don't want to kill you. A stained glass window."

"Oh?" When would Zero have seen a stained glass window? There had been one in General's office, but Zero hadn't paid any attention to it, unless he'd gone there with Iris sometime. X did think that they were pretty. Jewel-bright colors, a human figure made of metal, glass and light… Actually, that was a pretty good metaphor for an android, now that he thought about it. Glass _was_ silicon, and light was a form of electricity. He had to stare, realizing that. "That's surprisingly poetic." As though he needed any more proof that this wasn't the Zero he had known.

He paused in his circling, wondering what X was talking about. "Hmm? No, it's just a quote. It was Iris' favorite movie. The female human in it was even named after a flower." Although Buttercup was so prosaic a name. "It's why a swordsman in it doesn't finish off another swordsman, even though they're a very skilled and dangerous enemy and leaving them alive behind him is a risk. 'I'd sooner destroy a stained glass window than an artist like yourself.' Although you're more like the art_work_ of a very dangerous enemy that I _did _kill, actually." A long time ago.

He'd figured that out, but it still hurt. That Zero had been the one to… this Zero, not the Zero that was his friend. "You wanted to see if you could trick me into thinking you were still my friend, get me to trust you the way I trust him, and see how much control you could get over my systems that way?" Or was there more to it?

"You should have let me give you that energy." Tsk tsk. Such a foolish student. "You're just about running on empty. Try to do anything too active, like shoot or escape, and you'll fall over like one of the females in those old vampire movies. Only they didn't always have the excuse of severe anemia."

"I should have thought of that." Except he still hadn't really been able to think of Zero as his enemy, even when he'd known this wasn't Zero. He'd wanted to confront him about this with words, had somehow thought that would be enough even when he knew that with mavericks it _never was_, instead of trying to wring every advantage he could from a dangerous enemy. If his low level alert system worked like an ordinary reploid's, alarms would have been screaming at him, but the lowered performance was alarming enough, and he didn't want to _look _at the list of urgent necessities, not when it was depressingly long.

It was a little like the way Zero had woken up, he realized, except he could actually think. This Zero must still have a lot of X's nanites in him, too… and their components. Energy was one thing, but unless a bottle of multivitamins had fallen intact or something equally ridiculous, he doubted there were going to be any rare earths around here that he could identify or use except the ones he'd brought with him. Most reploids were simplified, standardized. They didn't use a lot of X's materials and their performance curves suffered for it. Not even Zero had X's complexity in that regard, which they'd thought was evidence he wasn't a century old. He hadn't done a century's worth of fiddling with his systems and optimizing them, anyway. Thomas Edison had needed to test hundreds of materials before finding that tungsten made the best lightbulb filament, for example.

Would Dr. Wily have wanted anyone to improve on his designs?

As X tried to watch Zero stalking him, and keep moving himself to try to have the better position, he realized that the nanites in Zero's systems probably _were _the only way to get himself back to full strength without heading back to base.

Except…

The blood that Zero had drunk on the initial rampage had done a _lot _more harm than good, Dr. Cain had found. Oxygen was the most corrosive element in the periodic table, water was an _industrial solvent _and about as close as anyone had found to a _universal_ one (there was even _gold _in seawater, and it was proverbial for resisting corrosion), red blood cells had evolved to try to avoid getting munched, and white blood cells were _very _good at killing anything that tried to mess with them _first_. The AIDs virus could manage it, because it knew how. Zero's nanites, Zero's _suboptimal, _stolen nanites… not so much. Putting all of that in among his main systems so he could try to take it apart for materials had done an incredible amount of minor damage, which then required nanites to repair, that just wasn't worth the few resources he'd been able to get out of it (especially since he hadn't been able to use the water for fusion). He might even have been _better off_ drinking hydrochloric acid. At least his systems would have known that was a threat instead of considering themselves 'waterproof' just because it wasn't making them short-circuit.

On the other hand, the use humans made of rare materials put X's systems to shame. They could even get sick from _arsenic deficiency_, and the reason arsenic made a good slow poison in the first place was that their bodies kept it around (which was why they almost never needed to eat it deliberately), the same way they did Vitamin A.

Unlike Zero, X had been designed to be able to pass for human, if he needed to. He _was _able to 'digest' human food, take it apart for useful resources and get rid of the rest, in a safe manner.

The realization that he had to get his materials back from Zero's body and he might need to do that after killing 'this' Zero sickened him, but that alternative was just… unthinkable. Ghoulish. Literally. He couldn't help shuddering, and the other noted the sign of weakness. "The offer's still open."

"Why?"

"Because there's nothing you can do to stop me." They both knew that saying something like that was tempting fate, so that smirk had to mean he was _very _certain.

"Or it's a trap."

"And what other options do you have, exactly?"

"…None that I can take." He couldn't escape and get back to base to restock with the energy he had, and if he tried to look for resources here… food stocks would be harder to find than… No.

…Except, maybe he did have another option.

X wished he'd realized that after this Zero had let him close, because now he'd have to hide the 'Eureka' until he was in range. Or, hmm… "Not a wrist," he said, as this Zero held that same arm out to him, offering. "That makes it too easy for you to control what I get." And of course he would try to do _some _kind of trap.

"That also means I can send more of your nanites to it than the virus, but if you _want _to just get a random sample…" X getting more virus in his systems would be to this Zero's advantage.

"The neck."

"What? You want to see if you have the jaw strength to bite my head off?" Interesting. "You don't." And the virus would keep him too disoriented to try to get a grip with his arms. The advantage would be entirely Omega's.

Not that Omega didn't _already _have the absolute advantage. X was within attack range of the virus: a short-range teleport would send it into his systems, to disable him or take him apart, and Omega had a lock on him.

"Take it or leave it."

"Yes: I _could_ just leave you here. This is the wreckage of a space station. The blast doors are mostly still intact… and now they're closed. You'd have to blast your way out of this area through feet of alloy, and right now you don't have enough weapon energy to get off a single shot without draining yourself, let alone multiple charged shots."

"Are you sure of that?"

Omega had to admire the way he wasn't backing down. "Yes, I am. This area is saturated with the virus. I can feel every inch of it. Even if you _were _to find some way to blast a hole into some area, I'd know. Instantly."

Now did X have some idea of the position he was in? Or had he already known, and was just refusing to give up?

"So there's no reason not to indulge you," he said when X remained silent, looking focused, determined and trying to think. The virus would disorient him, too, making it harder for him to come up with anything.

Just in case.

Omega casually removed his helmet and slit through the padding covering the side of his neck with a concealed claw. "Well?"

X stepped forward carefully, waiting for an attack and stiffly letting Omega wrap his arms around him since there wasn't really any point in objecting. He could, however, signal that no, they were _not _friends. Not like X and _his _Zero. It was so sweet of him, to think of Omega's amnesiac, distorted self that way. He was going to miss that.

X's body lost that battle-readiness not long after he put his lips to Omega's neck. Not because it relaxed him, the way it had Zero, but because the virus disoriented him, made it hard to maintain that self-control.

Not when he had to focus all of his attention on other things, like sieving out his own nanites and destroying the virus. It was easy enough for Omega to have the virus gather near X's fusion reactor, just a little… warning. One that would provoke him far less than going for his central processor, or even alluding to the possibility of trying to take it over.

And while he was doing that, X was going through and turning off his safety features.

Nanites weren't supposed to make other nanites, since that could lead to mutations that might cause the world to be covered in grey goo in the same way that long ago, some chemicals had started catalyzing the formation of similar chemicals and then all of a sudden there was green everywhere.

In the same way, nanites weren't supposed to react to anything except the body they were supposed to maintain and the properly formatted, premade raw materials put into it. They weren't supposed to leave a reploid's body, let alone scavenge the area for raw materials and take stuff apart for them. Reploids used powdered iron and other mixes of raw materials that were stored in cans, practically predigested, easy for the nanites to grab hold of and slot into place.

X had been built before the infrastructure that now made those cans for the convenience of reploids had been set up. Built when the rights of robots were a serious issue, and there was a very real risk that the governments might order him destroyed, the way they had six of Light's eight original robot masters (even if the decision had been revoked). He had been built to be himself and to be able to fend for himself. He could pass for human if he had to. He could take apart ingested matter for raw materials, even organic matter like shellfish, if he had to.

He could bypass all of the safeguards placed on modern reploid nanites, because Dr. Light hadn't just put him in that capsule so that the world would be ready to deal with a sapient life form that couldn't be hacked or controlled when he woke up. He had been put in that capsule to _evolve_ those safeguards. He had records of nanite configurations that had been rejected because they weren't safe, developed in the process of learning what was safe. And, at the same time, he had been learning how to design nanites that could tear just about anything apart for spare parts, down to and including _molecules_.

Zero had always been dismissive of the ability to eat human food, even though he 'sort of' had it, and Omega was aware that X's nanites could defend his systems by tearing virus nanites apart but hadn't thought of it as anything more than some kind of immune system.

Omega touched X's neck. "I should take my virus back, if you're not using it."

He mimed wanting to object, but that made it almost too easy, since this Zero would be expecting to get some of X's nanites along with the virus that way.

Zero's body was used to letting foreign nanites do their thing, even letting them into vital areas. It was very disorienting to try to study a system map that wasn't his own when input gotten this way always had been his own: he wondered if this was that 'phantom limb' feeling he'd read about.

It was actually fairly easy to redefine Zero's body as part of his own so his nanites would actually be willing to make changes to it.

The harder part was figuring out how to set up a time delay.

This was probably a very stupid idea. Zero had been built with the idea of taking over another android's systems in mind: Dr. Wily would have had to be an idiot not to design Zero to defend against that. On the other hand, there had never been anything but the virus that did something like this, so Zero would never have actually gotten a chance to _practice _being on defense. His systems certainly hadn't handled white blood cells very well, and X knew what he was dealing with.

Theoretically, Zero would be hard to sabotage, too. Going for the fusion reactor's containment was the obvious choice, and that was what this Zero was threatening him with, in fact, but Zero's fusion reactor wasn't working…. Waaait.

All he really had to do was get it started up, and keep it working long enough to induce the kind of catastrophic failure that had happened whenever they tried to install a working one in Zero. Then he could get his nanites back, loot Zero's energy stores, blast a path to Sigma…

And try to deal with the fact that his friend would either be dead or on the other side, just like Sigma.

But that was for later.

He wanted to say some kind of last words to Zero, 'I'm sorry,' or something, but that would be an obvious sign that he was about to try something, and he'd need the element of surprise.

His one indulgence was holding Zero tighter, and that was mostly to keep him from getting away.

He couldn't help but squeeze Zero and say, "I'm sorry," when Zero's neck was pulled free of his lip as his once-teacher _screamed_.

The very odd thing was that X hadn't even triggered containment failure yet: he'd only just started it up and as far as he could tell the containment was still working perfectly. And yet Zero's nanites and chips were getting boiled away just as if they really were getting drenched in plasma. The virus didn't have that weakness, it was fine in ordinary reploids, so why was this hurting Zero?

He held him tight, not sure which of them was shaking (changing his settings like that had messed up his interface worse than the virus), wanting so much to stop this but he _couldn't. _

He couldn't kill him because this was _Zero_.

He had to kill him because this was what the Zero he knew would have wanted.

X could have tried harder to defend his own fusion reactor against Zero's counterattack. He _should _have, because the entire point of this was getting out of here, defeating Sigma and saving the world. If he died here, all of this was for nothing. With both of them dead, Sigma would win. He knew that. He couldn't afford to die here, since that would make Zero's death be for nothing.

Except Zero was already dead, and he didn't move to defend his systems in time because somehow he felt like, "I deserved that." Taking advantage of someone's generosity, even an enemy's?


	6. Chapter 6

_A reviewer for the last chapter was surprised X would do something like that. Keep in mind that this is X. He doesn't want to hurt anyone and yet he still goes out there and racks up a hell of a body count, because the alternative is even more people being hurt. Is he willing to sell his soul and go over the moral event horizon to save the world? _

_Yes. Absolutely. _

_Forget Megaman Zero's original plot, where X ended up becoming convinced that the only way to end it was to eliminate reploids._

_He starts doing, or at least is preparing to do something, that he considers inherantly wrong/evil _before the first game starts_. Before the virus becomes public, before decades of war had a chance to start cracking him._

_X is a scary, scary person. The fact he's nice only makes it worse. It doesn't take a lot of determination for someone who doesn't value human, or sentient, life to kill. For X it does require a lot of determination/dedication, and he does it anyway. By the truckload. He regrets it, but he still does it. It's the whole good man/evil man thing pointed out in _Men at Arms_ (Pratchett). The victims of the virus are innocent victims, and X knows this, and he still kills them. Someone who didn't have ethical problems with killing innocent people would be a monster. Someone who does, and does it anyway, is damn scary._

* * *

He didn't open his eyes when he felt himself come back online because he recognized this place. Well, not so much a place as a state of being.

A human would have gone mad, in a century of solitary confinement, without sensory input from the outside world, but it hadn't been like that at all. The capsule had been a world in a bottle, or two worlds. The dream world where he could watch things unfold (there was so much more to it than ethical simulations), and his own body. Watching it work, learning what worked and what didn't, _understanding_ himself from the ground up. Creating himself. So many things to tinker with, no, to _play _with.

How could he ever doubt that Dr. Light had cared about him when he'd taken such care with him? And _for _him. He'd thought slowly, at first, because he'd been learning how to think, with the tools he'd been provided. Given the freedom to discover his own way to be. The concept of self had been, and still was, fascinating, and the thought of _other _people?

These weren't his nanites that were rebuilding him: they were the original design that the capsule had used to take care of him until he'd figured out how to take care of himself. He had to smile, albeit inwardly since he didn't have motor function there yet, because it was so nostalgic.

His father was still taking care of him, even after all this time. He'd known that since he'd found the first armor capsule, and yet it still made him feel so… loved. And guilty.

Because he wasn't able to protect his own children.

According to his internal clock, it had only been a couple of hours, and he thought the work would be done soon. Well, this would get him out of the cage the other Zero had constructed, hopefully, even if he'd have to fight his way back in.

Zero…

Hours and hours of memory logs, and he almost wanted to lock them away. It _hurt_, the thought that the enemy would now have his best friend's face as well as his first child's. Maybe, maybe afterwards he could try to deal with it, but for now he would have to fight.

It was hard to despair here, the place that was his equivalent of being wrapped in a mother's arms, sheltered and loved, but even here he was torn between crying and screaming.

Hadn't the virus taken enough?

No. He knew that it would never have enough until it had _everything_. It wouldn't stop killing humans until the last of them were dead. It wouldn't stop infecting reploids until all of them were lost. That was why he had to fight. Because if he did nothing, that was the same as killing them himself, in the end. They needed him. So he couldn't stop fighting, not even to mourn. If he didn't fight after he'd lost someone? Then he'd never have started fighting. So, so many died every single day.

Now the virus was in the sky, the world in Sigma's grasp, and the other immune hunter was lost. He really was the only hope left. So he couldn't believe that it was alright, he couldn't drift off into contemplation the way this place made him long to. A simple place, where everything was fixable, he had all the time in the world to learn how to do things, and if he messed up then someone would step in to save him. Now he was the one who had to save people.

He knew that.

And yet he almost didn't want to open his eyes when the capsule opened. "This is a backup station. I had hoped you'd never need to use these… I've made you a new armor as well. Step onto the teleporter pad when you're ready." X only saw the last few seconds of Dr. Light's hologram.

He already had the new armor on: he'd been rebuilt wearing it. Well, nothing left to do but go on.

* * *

X arrived fairly near the center of the crash site (Eurasia had been large and pieces had broken off, leaving a trail behind it, as it entered atmosphere), and hadn't even made up his mind about whether to head right in or contact the hunters first (they might want to order him back to base, and they'd already lost too much time), when not-Zero arrived.

This wasn't a new reploid body, though, just a purple and black form composed of the virus.

But it was still, "Zero_," _and the relief made him fall to his knees. Even if his Zero was asleep within this other, never to be allowed to regain control, at least he wasn't dead.

At least X hadn't killed him. Was this how Zero had felt, when X had asked him to kill his friend if X ever became maverick? X owed him an apology, if so.

"You can't destroy me, and that means I win." It gestured upwards and the virus swarmed, within this figure and in the very sky. Every hour this went on, more and more would be infected, and ordered to attack shelters and bases that were still free. More and more would die.

"I have to try," he said, raising his buster. Even if it killed them both.

"…Yes." Because X was X.

"You're suppressing Zero's memories, aren't you? Otherwise, you'd be acting more like him."

"Yes. So?"

X didn't have to say it. They both knew that he wanted his Zero back, that he'd be willing to beg for it if that would do any good.

"I need to locate that backup station. So you'll just have to die again, and again, until I manage to trace the signal or you stay put until I'm done like a good boy."

The figure reached out to him, and he tried to stand up but the too-familiar disorientation hit, hard and fast, until he couldn't tell up from down or light from darkness.

It eased up enough to let him feel the ghost of a touch on his cheek. "Sleeping in your crystal coffin, waiting to wake up… I almost wish they'd let you dream a little longer, even if wouldn't have been able to survive without reploids to feed on, and the supplies the two of you made me." X and Dr. Cain, who wasn't like Dr. Wily at all. Dr. Wily had insisted that they were equal, no, superior, fighting against the world. Dr. Cain had just… taken it as a given that he, that X, that all of them were people, and tried to tell Zero that he had worth and a right to live when he'd thought he didn't.

The memories of that time were so traumatic that they'd shaped X's Zero in ways he could never break free from, and when he let himself remember them it was too easy to fall into that pattern of hating himself for killing, even for killing humans, when he _knew _that he was doing the right thing. Dr. Wily had shown him why, but Dr. Cain wasn't like that at all. Sure, one exception didn't prove anything, but he'd met humans in this life, while in the last one he hadn't gotten to know them, just killed them, and then there was X…

Those memories left him paralyzed with guilt and indecision, unable to do anything: there was no chance of X's Zero breaking free or anything melodramatic like that. He despised inaction: something had to be done, and only one of him knew what to do. Sure, X's Zero might know that the only solution was to kill himself, but that was the last thing X and Cain would want him to do.

He didn't want to do anything to hurt X, but the problem was that he already had. And he was, and the only way to stop was to _finish it_. X would be sad if they died, but X would be sad if he died… X made him want to live, to stay with him.

Gentle, but fierce when he needed to be. Kind, but able to harden his heart when he needed to. Bright, a beautiful shining star, and oh for crying out loud, was he _really _in love with his destined enemy? What _was _it with Lightbots?

He almost wanted to just forget about it all, leave reploids and humans to their own devices, let the humans kill the reploids or they could all die for all he cared, and drag X away someplace where _he _could be safe. Just let him sleep for eternity, dreaming of nothing but himself and Zero, their own little world where there would be nothing to hurt them. He could take Iris, too, and Colonel, and maybe they would finally be able to be strong enough to become one again. Sigma… He would hate himself, for what he'd done, but it would be over and X would be there, to comfort and forgive him.

This was wrong.

Sigma would know it was wrong, the instant the virus was taken away. X insisted that it was wrong, or he would if he could speak. The cheek that he touched (and it was such an effort to feel, with a pseudo-body like this) was trembling, not from fear (not ever), and not from exhaustion (his energy had been restored), but a manifestation of the chaos the virus was sowing in his body, unable to attack Omega or even to hold still. He was doing a much better job of fighting it now than before, when Omega had been draining him of his nanites.

A _much _better job. Omega had been too distracted by trying to get sensory data to pay attention to exactly _how _much virus he was flooding X with to get him to this point, and how quickly he was replacing it. The virus had grown weaker over time as it mutated, since reploids weren't any challenge to take over: that was why it would be a fatal mistake to build more resistant reploids like Signas. Sigma had been aware that the virus was weakening, and that was why he'd launched this whole scheme to replace it, a final, last-ditch gamble to wake Omega up or gain victory before the virus weakened enough that it would be possible to actually devise a way to fight it.

X had focused on enduring the virus before, trying to get it out of his systems as fast as possible so he could move on. Now he was focusing on studying it, learning how it did what it did and how to destroy it the most efficient way possible. Or at least he was _trying _to do that, but there was so much of it, and just like earlier today it was taking almost all he had not to beg for the _wrongness_ to stop.

It wasn't long before Omega decided to forget precautions, he was going to teleport his new body over here and he didn't particularly care if X managed to destroy it too. It wasn't like it would change anything.

"So frail," he murmured, before replacing this false body with his new one. "And so strong." He wanted to bite him again, even if the last times, since he woke up, hadn't been anything like that one time.

At night, in X's room: it had been so quiet, the only sounds theirs. X had been at peace, and had cared for him so deeply it was almost possible to overlook it. Iris' love had been excited flashes and admiration, something they'd both made much of, while X's had just been _there, _a foundation, an 'of course.'

Now, though, as he pulled his once-student to him, there was chaos, and desperate fear for the others was near the surface instead of buried under meditative calm. That love was still there, but so was hatred, which shocked him until he realized that it was self-hatred. Guilt. He wanted to soothe X, because X didn't deserve to feel guilty the way he should, and as he drew more in to analyze it he didn't notice how easy it was. How much clearer the emotions were. No, the only thing he was checking for was physical sabotage.

Only the virus could interfere with a reploid on the mental level, that was a truism.

And yet, suddenly he wasn't just feeling what X felt. X was _there, _and Omega realized that once again the guilt was for what X was about to do.

No other android, especially not Dr. Light's creation, should have been able to hack him, the master of the virus. No other android should have been able to best him in a battle of wills, and, most importantly, no other should have been able to force him to submit, to change his personality. Omega had been designed with this sort of thing in mind. He should have been the absolute master of it, able to win any contest.

But this was a clash of mind against mind, self against self, and one of them knew who he was beyond any doubt while the other was divided, his true self already suppressed. So there _was _no contest.

Now, once again, X was the one who held Zero. "I'm sorry," he said again, remembering the last time and shuddering, because there were things worse than death.

Oh? "You did what you had to do." Zero replied, tired from the effort it took to sweep the sky clean of virus and cure the mavericks. That was part of what he'd always admired about X, that he'd do what he had to no matter how much he hated it, no matter how high the cost to himself.

He would never begrudge X that.

Even if he were still capable of it.

"I'm so sorry. Zero, I…"

He put his hand over X's mouth. "The alternative was killing me, and that wouldn't get the virus or Sigma dealt with. This is the right thing to do." More than that, "I'm proud of you." He let his eyes close, resting against him. "I wasn't immune when I was newbuilt, was I? I didn't know any better, I believed all the data he gave me, everything he told me. But I am immune now, I know more now and I still, I still let it carry me along, because it made everything seem so simple. The way to protect you, to protect everyone, when nothing we'd tried ever worked and it was all my fault."

It was hard to tell X that it was worth it to fight when everyone could see that killing Sigma's manifestations did absolutely nothing but delay the inevitable. Every war, ground was lost, morale was lost, and the world was dragged closer and closer to its end.

Zero sighed and admitted that, "I already did a lot worse than this to myself. And changing someone like this… isn't really that different from curing the virus." Taking away the racism and mania it engendered, trying to recreate who the person had been and make them more peaceful so they wouldn't fall into the virus' thought patterns while trying to remember their own. The virus made things easy. It was only natural to want to retreat back into it when the reality of what they had done hit them. The virus kept it from hurting, kept the guilt from crushing them. "I'm sorry you had to do that."

"Of course you don't hate me for doing this to you – Zero, I just tampered with your mind." That was… there was nothing more evil than that.

"And I don't mind. It's not like you did anything permanent. It'll wear off as soon as your nanites wear out."

"What will happen then?"

Zero's silence was answer enough. X would have to keep replacing the nanites. He would have to keep doing this to Zero.

"Do you think you will ever be able to be yourself again?" The Zero X had known all these years. Would X ever be able to stop… it was much worse than just drugging him.

"I don't know."

There was only one way to find out, and it was too much of a risk, not when this trick wouldn't work twice. X had only managed it because the other Zero hadn't seen it coming. If X let him wake up, the other Zero would never forgive him for this, and then all of this would begin again.

"I'm sorry," was all he could say, as the future stretched out before him.

Peace for the world, finally. No more children slaughtered before their first birthday.

He'd have to keep Zero supplied with nanites, he'd have to watch him constantly to make sure nothing went wrong. He'd have to be his best friend's jailor, making sure Zero could never return to himself. The person with him wasn't X's Zero any more than the other had been: the other had been warped by the virus and this one… X had done this to him. And he would have to _keep doing it. _He'd have to stay close to 'Zero,' all the while _knowing_.

And he would do it.

Was peace worth what amounted to killing his best friend? Was it worth doing something evil, something everything he was cried out against?

Yes. Killing was also wrong, and he'd been doing that for years, even though the guilt tore at him. This was just one more sin, one more awful thing that he was going to have to do, for the sake of his children. He didn't have the right to always do the right thing. He didn't have the right to refuse to do what was necessary.

Because they were his children, his _responsibility, _and this was what would save them, save their parent race, save _everyone_.

This solution even preserved Zero's body.

If not his soul.

So, "I'm sorry," was all he could say, as Zero held him comfortingly in a way that was just not Zero, proof of the fact that X had essentially remodeled Zero's personality in his own image.

"It's ok," that person said, because X would try to comfort someone this miserable, even though they both understood the magnitude of what had happened, what was happening, and what would continue to happen until they both finally died true deaths.

"What do I tell the others?"

"The truth. Trying to hide it would make it harder for you to keep me under control, especially since they already suspect. They could help make sure _he _never broke free."

"But that means…" That Zero would be imprisoned. Hated as the source of it all, blamed for all that had happened. "No." He wouldn't let that happen. "It would be easier to seal you away if I wasn't distracted." If he wasn't trying to live a normal life and reassure people. "Perhaps I could eventually find a way to change you so _he _couldn't use the virus." Then the world be safe and Zero (he hoped it would be his Zero) could wake up.

* * *

_Anyone here read _Carpe Jugulum_? If not, do so. It's by Terry Pratchett. Although this is nowhere near as epic as getting Weatherwaxed, it's just where I'm ripping off the concept from._


	7. Chapter 7

Ciel's right hand clung tight to her blaster: her left had curled into a fist so tight that if it weren't for her gloves, her nails would have cut into her palm.

It would have been appropriate if they had. There was enough blood on her hands.

She was alone now, except for Passy. The brave reploids who had come with her, to protect her, had stayed behind, one by one, to die fighting. She'd wanted to stop them, but she'd had to let them. All a human captured by Weil's forces had to worry about was death. For reploids, dying before capture was the best they could hope for.

Well, there was one exception to that. One type of human that Weil had a terrible, terrible _use _for. Eurasia, the Elf Wars, and now that he'd returned, his campaign to eliminate resistance by eliminating the memory of a time when he wasn't god by killing everyone old enough to remember, old enough to fight, meant he was running out of human subjects to rule.

Of course he wouldn't allow _that._

Ciel didn't need to worry, though. She'd made sure that she wasn't fertile herself. He couldn't make her one of his 'brides.' Or at least he wouldn't get any children out of it.

Of course, Weil had _plans _for her. For anyone who resisted, but especially one of the only people who had done so with any success whatsoever. One of the descendants of the people who had defeated him and exiled him the first time around, no less.

After the end of the maverick wars, there had been no answers. No resolution. No surviving heroes. The wars had been 'won' before, so people marked each six-month anniversary with near-panic, convinced that Sigma was going to rise again. He hadn't, and without him crippling them, research into immunity had gone ahead by leaps and bounds. Gate's attempt to replicate Zero's immunity had revealed the possibility of energy life forms, and Weil, among others, had improved on the idea to create the 'support unit' elves.

Then he'd unleashed the Dark Elf.

If it weren't for Dr. Arciel's Copy-X and the three products of the newtype reploid project, there wouldn't have been any reploids capable of resisting her song of insanity and fighting him. Of them all, only Copy-X had 'survived,' albeit in the form of a vegetable, considered beyond repair. After that, even the people most opposed to and terrified by it had to admit that cyborg research was necessary. The world's survival couldn't rest in the hands of reploids alone, not when they were always the first to fall prey to the latest threats.

Then wars began to break out between _people_, without any rightful leadership or guides to the future, and it hadn't stopped.

Until Ciel's mother had figured out how to repair Copy-X, and started the difficult process of trying to restore his original mind and mental state.

Until she died, ten years later, and Ciel was presented with a priceless opportunity.

Until Ciel had thought that a child martyr wouldn't be enough to unite the world, and decided it would be better if everyone thought a _different _ancient hero had returned.

Until she'd broken the Copy's mind, trying to assemble it into the form the world needed.

He'd taken control, alright. He'd ended the constant, petty wars.

Then Weil had returned, and taken control of that centralized authority. Started to 'retire' members of _both_ races.

It was only fair, after all.

The one hope they had was that Weil still hadn't been able to find and regain control of his Dark Elf. Ciel had to find her first, and then Neo Arcadia's army could be turned against itself. Perhaps the Dark Elf knew the secret, the reason Weil simply never stayed dead, no matter how he was killed.

Instead, she awakened another sleeping power.

* * *

Trapped, there was nothing Zero could do as Elpizo destroyed X. Smashed, desecrated the body Zero had woken up curled around, the one that he must protect. The one who had been his friend, in the past. The one who still helped him, guided him, fed him, because the blood of Weil's droids was thin and weak and Ciel's allies, who were starving themselves, had nothing to spare. No matter where he went, he was always drawn back here. He'd known that he shouldn't risk coming back so often, not when someone might find X and the dark elf, but he'd also known that he _had _to return. Even when he'd forgotten everything else, the hunger forced him to remember that. The hunger that gnawed at his body, the fear that gnawed at his mind, the longing that gnawed at his heart.

There were five stages of grief, and he passed through them almost instantly. Perhaps because of the ages of practice he didn't remember. Perhaps because they were pushed through by a rising tide of pure panic. "You don't know what you've done."

And Elpizo and Ciel thought he was just talking about the threat of the Dark Elf.

Of course, Zero hadn't known what he was talking about, either.

As he fought Elpizo, as he took damage and felt the hunger rise, he knew that he was running out of time somehow. That some doom was coming closer. X, X could save him from it, but X was dead, as far as he knew.

The two hours it took for X to be restored from backup were one and a half too many. With X's nanites worn away by the battle, after feeding from Elpizo, Omega was able to restore himself.

Dr. Weil would be his first target, he decided.

After all, the existence of another of his kind was not to be tolerated. This was _his _planet. Although the nanite blend Weil had used to insure his immortality _was _interesting. If it could restore his personality even if he was shot in the head, then it should be simple to adapt it into a form that would allow the virus to take both reploids and humans.

Humans like brave, foolish, fragile Ciel, who had blacked out touching the energy barrier, trying to get past it to rescue X, just like him.

Hopefully she'd survive until X respawned. Omega knew nothing about human medicine, aside from the fact it was probably a bad idea to move her. Or was that just physical injuries?

Telling X to fix her before the two of them fought would give X time to think, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

When she started to have trouble breathing, that was when he got worried enough to tap Zero's memories, since Zero _had _learned first aid and triage. She hadn't broken any bones, so it was probably safe to pick her up. Safer than to stay here, when Neo Arcadia was likely to send more troops.

It was a bad idea to try to fight while carrying an unconscious human, Zero remembered. Luckily, Omega had ways of dealing with enemies before they could get close enough to shoot him. By making them into friends, for example.

The new Zero – did he have three potential personalities now? – knew what the base was, what all the new models were called, and so on. The idea that someone had actually succeeded in creating immune reploids was more worrisome, even if there were none alive now.

…he should probably fully take in the memories of this younger self instead of keeping them at arms' length. They shouldn't be as strong or as formative as those of X's Zero. This self hadn't had as much time to deal with things and figure out who he was. It wouldn't be as dangerous, and the last thing he needed was a third self. A third set of memories that could potentially overwhelm him.

The absolute last thing he needed was for this self to act up when X came back. It might be even more devoted to him than 'Commander Zero' had been.

X had been the only thing he/they had known.

X's Zero's life had been that of military personnel: long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of extreme terror. Or worse, guilt, but he'd had people there. He hadn't gotten over it, but the edge had been taken off.

Omega had experienced nothing but war and… difficult things until he died. Both times.

This Zero…

X had always been there.

He hadn't been able to leave his body that often: sealing the dark elf and making sure Weil and Neo Arcadia didn't find them or track Zero's teleports was a constant drain, but when Zero had needed tech support breaking in somewhere or finding information Ciel needed, he'd always managed, somehow. X could give him what energy he had and retreat instead of dying, like the other cyber elves.

X had loved him. The fact he'd never said it, that it had never come up, was just more proof. You talked about things that needed talking about.

X had loved him, and he'd failed him… No. He hadn't.

X was still alive.

If he got Ciel back to base, then probably they could look after her there. There had to be _someone _there who knew more about human medicine than he did.

…in this segregated day and age? Among young, desperate reploid refugees? When he'd had the equivalent of an EMT license and had picked up quite a few more things from X?

Probably not.

* * *

It was worth it, worth _everything_, to see X teleport in, scared and desperate, the resistance members either scrambling to get away from the person they assumed was Copy-X or to trying to kill him (thankfully no one actually fired), only to find Zero pouring alcohol on the last of the scrapes Ciel had picked up and telling Cerveau to wake her up every half hour since she'd hit her head on the ground after the barrier had zapped her.

X's eyes had opened wide, startled, staring and realizing what he was seeing. No maverick would take care of a human like that when he didn't have to. The almost-purified Zero he'd had to let wake up wouldn't have known how to identify a concussion.

Zero _remembered. _He wasn't bound any longer, by X or the virus.

Zero looked fond of him, and also sort of amused in that 'X is surprised again or doesn't get something basic' way.

Zero, his Zero, was back.

Zero had never seen anyone literally cry tears of joy before, but they were there, in the corner of his eyes, before Zero stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and bit down, on the neck, as his youngest self had so many times. X's head tilted to the side, one hand wrapped around Zero's ponytail, gently pressing his head down, and Zero swore he could hear a very, very faint sob.

X's emotional display systems were as beautiful as the rest of him.

"Zero," his partner whispered. "Zero."

X hadn't done anything more than this with Zero's younger self. It hadn't been _right_, to take advantage of someone he'd reduced to a child so that he could develop his own personality. Reploids started with a foundation of nanites derived from X's on which they could build their personality. Replacing that with the virus was like taking a city on top of a mountain and transporting it to the same elevation above a swamp. There would be recognizable bits in the wreckage, but…

Replacing the virus with X's nanites, as he'd tried to do for Zero, had been like burying a city built in that swamp deep inside a mountain. There'd been so little left of his Zero.

But people could rebuild, and it had been so heartbreaking to watch Zero become himself again. Now Zero, his Zero, was back.

It was a miracle.

When Zero drew back, cupped X's face in his hands and kissed him for the first time (well, first on the lips, but had the bite ever not been a kiss?), all he could do was open to it. All he could do was let Zero hold him as he shook and felt like he would shake apart.

Zero bit his own lip and X could taste it, could feel the heady mix of rough affection and total devotion, could be sure that Zero wasn't giving him the virus. Could know that this wasn't some trick, and that this was Zero. His Zero.

When Zero finally broke the kiss, X collapsed against his chest, feeling as wrung out as if Zero had drained him dry. Strange, that happiness could do to him what grief never had. Zero wrapped an arm around to him to hold him up, and X could feel him straighten and give the onlookers a _look_. He didn't have to turn around to hear them scatter as that look commanded, he didn't have to stop listening to Zero's unique system noise. So quiet and so familiar, after all these years.

Was this what they meant by so happy you could die?

Everything was right again, finally, finally. There was still Weil, and how on earth had a human managed to give themselves a condition so much like Zero's, and the poor copy, and the energy crisis that Weil had caused by destroying all the orbitals and power plants to force people to his city, but Zero was back.

They could do anything, now.

"Come on, let's find somewhere private to talk. Ciel needs her rest," Zero said, not quiet enough she wouldn't hear but quiet enough to make the point that she could debrief him later, he needed to look after X now, and lifted X up easily.

X let him, X who had so much faith in him. X who loved him.

X who had no idea that Zero had used the virus to keep the braver resistance members from shooting in order to protect Ciel from 'Copy-X.' Not to mention that it had only taken a second or so to revive quite a few of the enemies he'd slaughtered on the way to X and send them off to Neo Arcadia, to spread the virus. Quite a few had nothing visibly wrong with them.

Those were the sort that made the second-best carriers. The best were the ones who didn't know they were carriers.

* * *

Zero had started pressing X to drink a little not long after Ciel had woken him up. It hadn't been fair, for him to get to feed from X (taste his love), and X not to have the same thing. Now that he'd learned how to interact with the nanites of others, how to read them, he hadn't been able to turn the gift down. It was addictive, being loved, even if he hadn't deserved it. Even if he'd been the one to reduce Zero to such simplicity.

The taste was different now. X had read that wines could mature with age, have fuller, deeper flavors. He wouldn't know, he'd never drunk any wine. (No joke about Zero's condition intended.) Now that Zero was free, now that he had his memories back, there was so much more there. It proved beyond any doubt that this was his Zero.

And Zero didn't hate him.

Zero had shown him that in every way possible, and if only X had realized that he loved him back then.

He let Zero tuck him in, tired from the revival and the drain of having to create so many new nanites, savoring those Zero had left in his systems, happy for the warmth that flowed through him.

It didn't occur to him that nanites that carried Zero's personality so strongly had to be virus nanites.

"You really think you can stop me? Kill me, and I'll just rise again, stronger than ever!" Weil laughed, and didn't even bother to activate the lasers built into the walls. With the power he now had, he could surely defeat even a legendary hero. Then, he could take Zero's body, copy his capabilities, learn what had made him immune and improve the dark elf so no one would ever be able to defy him again.

"I thought you'd studied me." Tsk tsk. "You're not the only great sinner who has ever risen from the grave." Zero sheathed his beam saber, and fell into a rather strange ready position. A black wind began to whip around him. "You should respect your elders, Copy-Wily." His arm moved, as though he was throwing a dagger, and that darkness engulfed Weil.

At first he thought it was just something meant to jam his sensors and blind him, until his armor began to be eaten away, piece by piece. Weil had never heard of army ants, the ones that could strip an elephant to the bone, or he might have realized what was happening sooner.

He had been a leading scientist. Sure, he'd read in some book somewhere that theoretically nanites could be used to break down matter other than inside a reploid's systems, theoretically rogue nanites could replace organic life, but he'd worked with nanites derived from X's all his life. Learning how to control them had required becoming an expert on them. The closest thing to a rogue nanite that he'd ever heard about in real life had been the virus, and it had done exactly what was meant to.

To the insides of reploids' heads, yes. And it had also distorted space, but it hadn't eaten away at people's bodies like acid.

He fell to the ground.

Zero walked forward, drew his saber again, flipped Weil onto his back with a boot and touched his saber to the dead man's throat to see if he was even able to struggle for his life. "Pitiful."

Weil's nanites were easy to observe, easy to hack. What he needed was to observe how they interacted with his brain, and the best way was to give his brain lots of stimuli to deal with.

Like, oh, pain.

* * *

_Goddammit, I wanted cheerful crack with Iris in a wedding dress throwing a bouquet (Bride of Zero~)._

_Many people have said it, but it bears repeating: Ciel was too young to have built Copy-X as the game says. The ways to deal with that plot hole are to age her up or to find some way for her to have accomplished something similar (something that would give her that guilt) at the age the game gives her._


	8. Chapter 8

_Yes, I am aware it's only Wednesday. I am posting early this week to let people know that I have a fic (or several fics, depending on the amount of the final bid and the bonus wordcount) up for auction on the lj group Help_Japan. If you want a direct link, go to my profile: the link where it says homepage will take you to my livejournal, where the top public post should link to the comment with my offer. I'd recommend checking out the rest of the post, though, because there are some good authors on there, and apparently so many authors are participating that the Help_Japan group added another post for them to make offers on. There are also posts offering art, physical goods, etc. etc. If there's a fic you wish existed, check it out: it's for a good cause._

_Hijacked By Mythology isn't a trope, but it should be when it comes to my work. I'm not the happiest with these last three chapters, but they did something interesting so I couldn't scrap them. Ah well. The fic will be done in a couple more weeks, or two and a half weeks since I'm posting early this week._

"I managed to find some medicine, Ciel. This will help you recover faster."

The contents of that little bottle would also make her immortal and give him the ability to control her mind if he ever felt like it, but Zero had spent most of his time in eras when governments hadn't bothered to force people to list all potential side effects.

* * *

With Weil dead, and a true death this time, 'liberating' Neo Arcadia was merely a formality. The citizens had learned how bad an idea it was to fight back against anyone. So it was just a matter of revealing that Copy-X had been messed with and not X in the first place. No one was going to argue. X didn't have any interest in ruling: he'd rather do useful things with his time.

Like build a proper hospital and go on walks with Zero, making notes about what areas of the city needed what fixes. Zero didn't bother to even pretend to pay attention, since X didn't expect him to, and used those trips to gauge how well his virus had spread and help it along a bit. Not that he'd needed to use it for anything so far but making trigger-happy resistance members realize that wasn't Copy-X.

Neo Arcadia was a nice, quiet little city, and as long as it stayed that way, as long as people did what they were told and helped restore the land to something more befitting Elysium, Omega wouldn't have to make this an Elysium under his absolute control or without humans.

And as long as he didn't have to do anything that would reveal that he was still Omega, still using the virus, X wouldn't have to fight him and Omega wouldn't have to reveal that he'd finally managed to infect X, even if his hold wasn't secure enough to risk actually trying to mess with his mind. X could still fry the virus if he did, and that would ruin everything.

Everything could just stay like this, peaceful. With the time to go on walks like this and spend the days in a proper bed with X. Time to train, dust off old and new skills, and scold X into training as well, because even if there was peace now, not being able to protect this world (or the people on it Zero cared about, at least) wasn't an option for either of them, and X knew it, as much as he hated fighting.

X was beautiful when he fought, all fierce determination. Part of him even liked the pain in X's eyes, because it showed how strong he was, to bear it, but training wasn't like fighting. It was almost a game, and if Zero timed his jokes right and X was in a good mood, then it would call up memories of other spars instead of desperate battles.

They seemed to have ended up the first couple, or whatever, which was unfair since it was Ciel and X doing all the work, not him (he might be able to take over whenever he felt like it, but no one knew that yet), but he remembered Iris and how many people had turned around to look at them in the halls, following them with their eyes and longing. Love did that. Zero had never loved many people, but he'd loved them all beyond words. Dr. Wily had stored himself in the virus, for when Zero needed help reviving, the way Dr. Light had made a copy of himself for X, and now that Zero knew how to handle brain-nanite interaction he could recall him (although saner, obviously) as well as Iris and all the others.

Obviously he couldn't do that yet. Not even Iris, because X would ask questions. Eventually he _would _find out, he and Ciel were tag-teaming the city's various medical issues whenever they had a moment. So far, X was focusing on the human side of things because he was the one who knew human medicine, but eventually more doctors would be trained up and he would have the time to go back to trying to figure out how to give reploids a fair amount of his own capabilities and safety features. Zero knew he had to tell him before then, it would look terrible if X found out on his own.

The memories of his youngest self wanted to tell X everything the way he always had, lying tangled together during the days he managed to visit to feed, but the maverick hunter had kept his secrets and part of Omega still thought of X as the enemy, or a potential enemy that he didn't want to become a true one again.

Not when X reached up and tangled his fingers in Zero's hair in idle moments, looking like he had everything he could ever want and so much he'd never dreamed of. Not when he bared his neck so fearlessly, glad to feed Zero, and after a few days together Zero could tell that he'd started to associate it with sex, to desire it almost as much as Zero did. Love, pleasure, closeness.

X sprawled out in his bed, drained, exhausted, traces of blood on his neck and lips, panting for breath until Zero gave him a glass of water to help replace his energy reserves (they didn't have the parts for internal fusion generators for reploids, these days, and if every reploid split apart water for the hydrogen they'd have had a problem, after the last few centuries), still not down from the high.

It hadn't been this good for Iris, but he'd known only the minimum about reploid physiology then and X's body had been designed to be about as easy to stimulate (once he turned that function on) as a male human's. Regular reploids were a lot harder to work with. Not that there was anything wrong with drawing it out, of course. X had a lot more stamina than Iris, both in general and in specific.

He set the virus to alert him if anyone started any fights and gradually turned on more and more of Weil's medical nanite functions whenever the amount of malnutrition and long-term damage and cancer and the host of other things that killed humans besides mavericks started to get X down. It was weird to use the virus to help humans stay alive, but it cut down on the weeks when X kicked him out so he could try to focus on going through his medical files for anything useful, like the fact you could ionize (or was it iodize?) salt since the humans couldn't get whatever component it was from fish. Half the treatments X was familiar with involved chemicals he couldn't produce even if he did know the formulae.

That was one of the things nanites could do, construct specialized chemicals, and Zero was considering mentioning that and using it as sort of a lead-in to the whole virus thing. The fact he was saving human lives was a pretty good reason for X not to be mad at him, right? Reploids, too, since they all had terrible parts. There were more irregulars now than at the very beginning of the Irregular Hunters, before the world had known what safety regulations to put in place.

Which was something else the virus was fixing, obviously. He was less worried about anything being noticed on that end because Ciel might be smart, but she was young, didn't have the diagnostic equipment X had built-in, and generally wasn't X. Experience counted for a lot.

She had noticed the improvement, obviously, she was far from stupid, but had happily assumed that it was due to better treatment and more energy as the new generators were put online.

Zero himself was generally getting stuck with whatever came up. He was one of the strongest living reploids, well-coordinated with what amounted to a fairly rare knowledge base nowadays. Even leaving what he knew (and had in his databanks) as Omega out of it. He hadn't really studied anything except combat and military tactics… and field medicine, both species, and how to identify and disable equipment, at minimum, which was useful for salvage missions these days. He actually knew quite a bit about communications methods in general, since there had been a period when they'd thought the virus was traveling by transmission instead of nanites but still needed to coordinate troops. Hunters had generally been encouraged to get hobbies, too, and Zero had seen a lot of them come and go. You picked up the theory of a lot of stuff if you were around people who talked about it.

Commander Zero had thought of himself as a specialist who didn't have a lot of general knowledge and didn't care to, but that was compared to X.

Once a reasonable amount of new generators had been constructed, Ciel had asked Zero to go take a look at the reactors and other hodge-podge power sources Neo Arcadia had been using, to figure out which of them were the most hazardous and needed to be replaced first, before they blew up on their own. He might not know how to fix them (theoretically), but he was an old hand at taking down Sigma's bases, and if you took out the power, you took out the weapons and teleport shields, depending on the amount of battery power.

So it only made sense to for them to send him to figure out how easy to wreck the generators were.

What they didn't know was that while Commander Zero might not know anything about how to fix things (except people), _he _did. So it wasn't any trouble to shore things up a bit.

When he got back to the tower, X had papers spread out all over a table.. He walked up behind him and put his hand on X's back to say hello. "I finished the assessments. They're all pretty worn out, but there are only a few real problem ones."

"Thank you." X reached up and back, pulling him down a bit.

Now that there was ambient virus again, all Zero had to do when he got peckish was draw some from those around him. He'd needed to do that to replace the nanites he'd left to reinforce and repair the generators, so he wasn't hungry enough to bite. Still, "Thanks for the offer," he said, kissing him on the lips, "but I'm fine. What are you working on?" The papers X was examining were the blueprints for the new generator spread out over a table – not the originals Ciel had found in Neo Arcadia's archives, but printouts.

"I'm looking over the generator design. It's obvious that Weil wouldn't have wanted to build any, not when the scarcity of power was part of what allowed him to retain power, but that means they haven't been tested." Ciel had only built them at remote bases so far, but if they were going to replace the city's generators?

Fusion plants could blow up. Fission plants could have the control rods stolen. Large-scale solar power was only viable with a _lot _of infrastructure they didn't have, since it required either tons of inefficient collectors or a reasonable amount of _very _efficient ones. Geothermal involved using scarce resources to build in volcano and earthquake country. Tidal… the last thing they needed was to damage the ecosystem even further. The safest source of power, according to modern doctrine, was hydrocarbon, but the last easily accessible reserves had been ruined by Weil during the Elf Wars, so Neo Arcadia was stuck trying to use several hodge-podge methods, like harvesting the methane given off during decomposition in its landfill.

"I didn't see any obvious problems." Zero shrugged.

X nodded. Of course Ciel would have noticed the things Zero would have, since she'd destroyed a few generators herself, in her time. "It would be nice if we could make them smaller than this… have you reported to Ciel yet?"

"No. I'll go take care of that."

"Hurry back?"

Oh? X wanted Zero to finish work up early? "Sure." He wondered what X had planned this time.

* * *

"I made something for you." X took a box out of one of the file cabinets that had been pressed into service for general storage. "Close your eyes."

Zero did so, wondering what it was. He heard X come closer and put the box down on the bedside table. Sitting next to Zero, he started to remove Zero's helmet. "Did you know that the predecessor to chemistry was alchemy? In the same way that meteorology was astrology. There was also a pre-scientific method equivalent of programming, did you know that? They used it to control their own brains and produce certain phenomena. They created some very interesting systems, even specific programming languages."

"For magic?"

"Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology because magic was their advanced technology. They couldn't build space installations to predict the weather, so they built monolith observatories. They didn't have the scientific method to eliminate the placebo effect, so they took advantage of the mental component to cure diseases, ensure favorable outcomes, and bring misfortune upon their enemies. Dr. Cain had a lucky charm, so that was something I looked into. The science behind it was very interesting. Even though reploids don't have the same instincts as part of our psychology the maverick hunters still developed superstitions, and when people are nervous they do make more mistakes, so… I told the rookies there wasn't anything wrong with having a lucky charm."

Lifting Zero's hair out of the way, X pulled something out of the box. A necklace, from the sound of it and where he meant to put it. "They do help, and it can't hurt." X began to place it around his neck, and if Zero had been a human, the hairs at the back of his neck would have been standing on end, his body telling him that something was up, something didn't feel right before his conscious mind had figured out what was going on. He still felt a little strange, but didn't really pay attention to it, because he was listening to X and there wasn't anything to be alarmed about. Right?

"Unless…" X said, snapping the necklace closed and waiting.

The world went grey. His vision was restricted to what was in front of his eyes alone, when they snapped open, and color vision still _felt _so vague and unclear compared to the sight he _should _have had. X seemed… almost not there at all, unreachably far away: what was this?

No, this was this was what he had seen, the sensory data he had access to, when he was Commander Zero. When he only had the senses of an ordinary reploid. When he had refused to be the virus and use that power.

He wanted to take the necklace off, but his arm lifted too slowly, he had to get it off _now_, but he couldn't tear at it with the virus, he couldn't do _anything _with the virus, it was like he'd been sealed away from it somehow.

And that might be exactly what had just happened now. This couldn't be an accident, but he still tried to act innocent. "Unless… What?"

"Unless you're what they would have described as... You're aware that the virus uses an atypical form of energy, right? And that a lot of virus nanites have designs incorporating geometric shapes that aren't practical? I had a lot of time with nothing to do but study the virus while I was trying to cure you of it, and I noticed something. Dr. Wily didn't shape your nanites, and quite a few of your other components, like that just because he felt like it. When I made changes, they had certain consistent, testable results.

"We use the presence or absence of an electrical pulse to tell computers what to do, and even enable them to think. He used three-dimensional shapes with precise angles and curves to control the flow of that energy. And even enable you to think. You aren't just a chip-nanite hybrid, that energy is another type of 'hardware' that you use for processing." That was part of why it had been so difficult to find a way for Zero to function without the virus. He really did need it. "A lot of things about those shapes and the ratios of them reminded me of what I'd read about Pathygoras, numerology… and once we came back here, I could look up things like pentagrams and the seal of Solomon. And I did, because better means of channeling and shaping intelligent energy would extend the lifespans of elves exponentially. Then, I saw the plans Ciel found. Didn't I tell you years ago that an artist's work was like a fingerprint?"

"Yeah, something about how you would recognize Dr. Cain's work anywhere, so you weren't worried that Sigma could build a fake Dr. Light capsule and trick you with it…" Oh. No. "That's where I made the mistake."

"I spent years trying to fix you, Zero," X said regretfully, because he'd failed. Zero could vaguely feel X removing the components from Zero's buster cannon. Everything below his neck was starting to grow dimmer. "I recognized Dr. Wily's work when I saw it, even if there weren't any insignia. Why would Neo Arcadia's archives contain the plans of what I would guess is the generator he used to power his fortresses? Unless you put it there for her. You're the only one who would have information like that." Zero felt X touch his cheek, and his hand felt so cold even if it wasn't as remote as touch elsewhere. "The last time I realized that you weren't you, I confronted you about it almost right away. This time, I waited until I had a plan."

"Smart." His, Commander Zero's student. "But I'm not, I'm not your enemy."

"I want to believe you. I was almost sure you weren't. But then I found evidence that you'd been working to take control behind our backs, deceiving us all this time. Do you know what happened to Ciel last week? We kept it secret, but you might have had some way of knowing." X had to take Zero's face in his hands to get Zero to focus on his eyes so X could try to read his expression and find out if he'd known or not. He seemed satisfied enough to explain.

"Ciel hasn't been getting very much sleep lately. She dropped a laser knife on her lap in her workshop. The blade went right through her thigh. It burned her, it burned through her clothes and the chair, but not only was her leg still attached, it wasn't even singed. So, since she didn't want anyone to panic, she asked me to help her run more tests and see if there was any way to get them out of her system, after she'd determined that she'd been infected with Weil's nanites somehow. Except they weren't Weil's. They were based on his, yes, but they hadn't been designed by him. And not even by Wily, although there were virus elements there. That only left one person. So, I built one of the early model virus detectors."

The later models required too much precision to be made in secret over a few days, even with two genius reploid designers involved. Three, counting Cerveau. "And I discovered that you've infected almost all of Neo Arcadia, reploid and human alike. Even me." Although he'd burned Zero's nanites out of his systems the instant the collar had gone on. To do it earlier would have given it away. "So far, you haven't done anything with them, but… why?"

Why? Why take control of so many? Why let me think that it was over? Unless the entire thing was an evil plot, an ambush. Wait until all of Neo Arcadia's people were infected and take control of them: it would be over without a shot fired. Omega would own them all, he could even make the humans kill _themselves_. Sigma creating a time delay virus had been the Maverick Hunters' true worst nightmare, since they would have had no warning, and Zero could turn it on and off at will. He'd held them all in the palm of his hand, seized them while their guard was down. While X's was, because he'd trusted him.

"Ciel's… fragile. Brave, but fragile. All it would have taken was one lucky shot, you know how I hated it when she had to come with me, and the reploids here, you were the one talking about how badly they're built. Weil didn't even care how many irregulars he built and had to destroy, not when he was killing healthy people too. He just didn't care how they came out." X had to believe him. "I wasn't going to kill them." Please?

X took a look at Zero's pupils again. Even if Zero's eye color hadn't been connected to what mode and mood he was in, reploids still had to make constant minute alterations to the configuration of their optics to focus properly. It was a good way of figuring out if there had been damage or disruption to their cognitive systems. "I wonder if this makes you feel like I did, when you ambushed me in that clump of virus."

"You said it was… nausea, right? And confusion, and… I don't know if I'm nauseous. I can't feel my legs." That sounded plaintive.

His youngest self: that part of him couldn't believe that X would ever do anything that would hurt him. Would ever look at him as though he might possibly hate him. He couldn't believe it, it was _wrong_.

Commander Zero could. X would do what had to be done.

It was harder to think of what Omega-self would think. Right, this was… clever.

Sounding so pitiful made X stroke his hair, and that made part of him calm a bit, even though X's expression, grim as he sat in painful judgment, didn't change. "Zero…" Now it did, now there was regret there. "Are you my Zero?"

"Yes." He had to reassure X, when X sounded so desperately sad, as though Zero was about to be torn from his grasp again. X must think that it had all been a lie. "I'm all of me, I love you."

X hesitated, his right hand tightening in Zero's hair. The way he squeezed it, once, seemed like biting a bullet, like something he did to steady himself. An instant later, he decisively removed that hand and lowered it to the necklace.

He turned the centerpiece once, into a new configuration, and Zero could feel the cut circuit reconnect. It took a minute for the energy flow to restore itself, to regain feeling in his legs and even then he still felt drained. Experimentally, he tried to nudge the virus inside his body and realized there was no response. X must have set it to stop blocking incoming transmissions, but he still couldn't send signals without being scrambled.

His legs might be under his control again, but the part of him that wasn't in this body, the part of him that wasn't an ordinary android, was still paralyzed. "That's clever." Different settings.

"No. You're not quite my Zero. Either of them." That wasn't how they would have reacted. X stood up. "Upgrading the elves with this energy-programming language should increase their stability. It's actually very similar to what Weil and the others developed. The dark elf was his attempt to recreate the ability to use energy to control reploid minds that the virus, that you have, after all. He used a different path to arrive at the same conclusion I did." That the design wasn't just ornamentation. "I actually tested this design on Nyx, although not the higher settings. They would kill her." Zero had some tolerance for disruption: a disrupted elf was a dead elf.

X had put something on Zero that could kill?

Remembering that deadness, Zero had to believe that this piece of jewelry could do it.

No, Dr. Wily wouldn't have let him have a weakness like that. The jewelry couldn't be more than… like a circuit breaker, maybe a few other simple functions.

…which wasn't a very reassuring thought. It was always easier to kill than capture, to destroy than restrain.

"Stay here," X ordered, and didn't slam the door behind him.

He hated sitting around doing nothing, but it wasn't more than a half-hour before the pulse hit him like a nova strike.

At that point he stopped feeling bored, he stopped feeling anything but _hunger_, and desperation drove the beast to punch at the walls until it realized that it couldn't get past them any more than it could get past the necklace and fell into torpor to conserve power.


	9. Chapter 9

He awoke with his lips around X's neck. It felt like forever before he was doing any thinking that wasn't about the blood and how perfect it tasted, how it was just what he needed, but once he did he knew this had to be a good sign. X could have just used an IV or a can.

"X? The energy has stabilized," he heard the dark elf say when he finally pulled himself together.

"Even if you managed to cure the others, just that wouldn't cure him." If only it was that easy. "If only we'd had you back then… Thank you."

"If you hadn't figured out how to let me control the output of an entire plant, I wouldn't have been able to cover all of Neo Arcadia with a single EMP pulse."

"Right, that was still only Neo Arcadia." X sighed.

"You… cured the virus? What about…" Oh _no. _"The reactors."

"Dr. Wily's?"

"No, the ones I checked! I put nanites there to stabilize them, that means that they were hooked up to the power grid! I figured that if the virus was supplying some power, it would take part of the load off the generators!" Oh _damn_.

X knew what that could mean. "We have surge protectors at the tower…" which would explain why the lights in here were still functioning. He didn't quite drop Zero down on their bed before he ran out the door to find Ciel and ask her if he'd blown half of Neo Arcadia's power grid. The city had barely been functioning: he doubted they had any sort of proper shielding or surge protection in civilian areas. Weil wouldn't have cared about _them_.

Zero lay there and breathed. That pulse had fried half his systems: X's nanites had repaired the vital ones and let him wake up, but he was nowhere near a hundred percent. He put a stop to any more repairs so he didn't have to go unconscious again until X returned.

He had to think.

What had happened out there?

It wasn't just the reactors, the virus offered substantial performance boosts, and Neo Arcadia's poor reploids had _needed _that.

It was all his fault, for not telling X before.

Oh… Oh _fuck_.

Zero didn't normally curse like Forte, but reploids? He could restore reploids. He still hadn't tested his ability to restore humans, and their nerves were conductors.

A suddenly cured reploid might get some localized power surges: no big deal in a properly built reploid, but some of Neo Arcadia's might have problems, especially the ones vulnerable to electricity.

A power surge in the human brain couldn't possibly be good.

He had to get up and find out what was going on before X saw too many dead bodies, or X would never forgive him.

Nor would X forgive himself.

He tried to repair the minimum amount of equipment, but remaining balanced while walking on two legs was much more complicated than humans thought it was. He also had to repair quite a bit of his arms and upper body to just sit up.

"Stay where you are!" The dark elf ordered. She was angry: X had protected her as well as Zero. For awhile it had been the both of them there, like family. She must feel like he'd betrayed them both.

Right, _she_ could tell X. Zero wouldn't be able to search the building for him like this. "Tell him… power surges, human brain, I can probably, fix it. Not sure. Haven't tested it yet. But if they're dead too long, making a whole new human body would be hard." Complicated, with lots of fiddly little cells and cells within cells and symbiotic species…

"What are you talking about?"

"Your emp blast. The human brain runs on electricity. …Just find X and ask him if they're alright, I can't tell." He still couldn't reach out of his body. That had been normal for two out of the three selves, but now it felt like he'd lost a limb. Or four? Did this self with all his memories count as a fourth self? "It's not your fault." The dark elf already had enough guilt. "I should have told you before, but I wanted to show X that it wouldn't hurt anything by showing him that it hadn't… X always worries about everyone, all his patients…" It was getting _very _hard to think. He still didn't think that he could move to find prey, but he should go into sleep mode. He was hungry and the dark elf, a big ball of energy just floating within arm's reach, was starting to look very, very tasty.

She had been derived from his DNA data: that was how she'd found them, back when X had taken her in, started trying to purify her as well. She was his little sister, daughter, something like that, so drooling over her for any reason was just wrong.

He'd killed his brothers, but he hadn't eaten them.

That was a disturbing memory to fall asleep to, he thought as he lay back down and closed his eyes. "Can't stay awake any longer."

It was a surprise to feel her press energy into him. It was even the virus' type of energy.

Evil energy, that was what it was, but they didn't know that.

He tried not to show the pleasure feeding always gave him, because this was the dark elf. "Thank you, but I need nanites, too." He wasn't a pure energy being, like her, any more than he was a pure android. "I'll just go to sleep until X wants me."

Just saying that reminded him that X didn't want him right now, which made one of him… which made him feel devastated. Better to sleep through it, and maybe X would listen and let Zero help when he woke up?

* * *

X wasn't there when he woke up. Just Cerveau, pressing a container of nanites to his lips. "Zero? Zero, can you hear me?"

"Where's X?"

"The emergency room. Ciel… can you heal her?"

"Not like this." Wait. "Ciel?" It made sense, he'd given her the full healing factor, so she would be the most affected by its removal.

"Come on." Cerveau pulled him up.

Wait. "Where's the dark elf?"

"I sent her on an errand."

"X doesn't know you're here asking me this, does he?" He couldn't just go infect someone the way Cerveau clearly wanted him to, X would be _pissed_. Still, this was Ciel. "I can think, so I must have virus nanites in me." The Dark Elf had given him the energy he'd need for that, and he'd changed his settings to tell the nanites he took into make virus nanites instead of trying to repair his own nanite-production systems years ago. "Take a sample from me and give it to her, that should be enough." The ones that weren't suited to humans would either convert or self-destruct. "The necklace just keeps me from controlling them. I think. They should still do what they're supposed to do."

"Should isn't good enough," Cerveau muttered, but he'd brought a syringe.

Zero closed his eyes, going back to sleep mode before he jumped Cerveau, and didn't notice Cerveau undoing the trick lock. He'd made it, after all.

* * *

X had done triage before. He knew how it went.

There were the people who would recover on their own, the people who would recover with immediate treatment and those who wouldn't recover even with treatment. Of course, even that depended on what was meant by immediate and treatment. And availability.

The hospital here had been a _joke _when Zero had killed Weil. There were only so many hours in the day: he'd drawn up the blueprints for life support equipment but it still had to be built and powered.

There were already several hundred people here, and more being brought in. Reploids with power surges… if they were category two, it would take too long to diagnose. Strokes and seizures were also either one or three. There was nothing he could do.

Not when all the medical staff they had were taken up by the accidents caused by the power outage. The people who could be saved, or not, _quickly_, so they could move on to the next patient. So that as many lives as possible could be saved.

He'd found Ciel first and gotten her into the best life support they had. He would almost kill for a chair like Dr. Cain had near the end of his life. Several dozen people were dying for the lack of one, right now.

He'd like to cry or scream, but there wasn't time, so he didn't let it slow him down.

He'd done this before, after all. Five wars and almost a hundred severe attacks he'd either been there for or attended the aftermath of.

He knew how to do this.

He knew how to deal with the knowledge that all of this was happening because he had failed. Because he hadn't been good enough.

He could fall apart when the dying stopped. Or actually, he wouldn't. He'd just keep going.

None of the other staff here had ever done anything like this. There were people he could save if he could do surgery, but no, he had to coordinate blood transfusions and rescue his trainees from people demanding they do things they couldn't when they could be doing the things they could and, "Cerveau? Where have you been? They need…"

"They need this."

"What is…?" X stared at the syringes in his hands. The purple-black color was distinctive. For years, death had been preferable to infection. He'd seen what it had done to his and Dr. Cain's first creation and to so many other innocent people.

There was no time to think of the consequences. Not when using the virus, with Weil's power of regeneration, would move so many people from category three to category two. Now that a cure for the virus was possible, the virus could keep them alive to be cured. Back then, death was preferable to the virus, but right now, the virus was better than death.

"It was my idea. Zero doesn't know. I scanned the sample I took from him and it's in production."

Cerveau handled mechanics. Things that he could see with his eyes and touch with his hands, hardware. Not nanites. "You got these for Ciel." X took a slow, deep breath, then nodded. "Hand them out to all the staff and volunteers. Inject all category three patients… No. All stroke patients." There was no other medication for it, not that they had, and Dr. Weil had survived brain injuries.

"Some of the recently declared dead might be revivable, Zero said."

X stared at Cerveau. "Then why are you standing here, if there's a time limit? Start with them."

What, was Cerveau expecting him to argue when people were dying?

* * *

Normally, the infected gave off stray virus that Zero could take in, but currently the virus in all the infected patients was too busy ensuring the survival of its hosts to waste resources on infecting others. The maverick virus had been quite the opposite, since the virus had viewed its host bodies as replaceable and tried to take over the hunters who had brought the maverick down, since they were obviously superior hosts. Mavericks were at their most infectious when they were dying.

Zero was several floors and a wing away from the ground floor areas that X had pressed into service since the power supply was reliable, so there was no virus to reach him and give him the nanites he needed to wake up.

The dark elf had only conveyed Zero's warning to X when she'd come to yell at Cerveau for sending her on a wild goose chase to get her out of X & Zero's rooms. Cerveau had injected Ciel first, with about half the sample, and after looking at her in the eyes for a few moments (no red, no obvious personality change, no time), X had let Ciel get to work helping fix patients. The mechanaloids Ciel and Cerveau had created and infected to incubate the virus for study only made so much, and there were patients dying.

They had a limited number of recharge capsules, and the reploid patients needed them. It was a day and a half more before X knew that he couldn't put off sleep any longer, not and retain the judgment that was the only contribution he could make.

Who knew that he'd miss bureaucracy? Hospital procedures? So many things needed to be handled, people needed to be directed, and he needed to train someone to handle them that wasn't him, so they would no longer be something that only he could do.

His room was Zero's room, and Zero was still there, asleep and starved. X had brought up a nanite counter: he'd suspected that Cerveau had drained him dry, but he had been too busy to think about it. On the one hand, Zero. Then there were his dying patients.

Omega was an entirely different matter. Or not.

The thing was, he really could understand why Zero had done it. X and Ciel had been talking, all the time, about how much help the people of Neo Arcadia needed, and this was Zero.

He hoped.

Zero who did what he could and didn't talk about the virus. Since X might have tried to overwhelm his mind, brainwash him, or something else drastic, not telling him made sense. It was better to ask forgiveness than permission.

The saying was certainly true. X knew that he was going to forgive Zero. The people who had died over the past two days had died because of him, not Zero.

Because he hadn't trusted Zero. Because he'd wanted to save them first and figure out if it was possible to save Zero later. Because he'd thought he needed to save them first?

No. Because they needed to be saved and he'd thought he couldn't deal with them after Zero…

Zero had done a very good job of replicating the Hunters' worst case scenario.

The best carrier of a bioweapon was someone asymptomatic who didn't know they were infected. Mavericks not only knew they were maverick, but they could only go so long before it eroded their personality and they not only lost the self-control necessary to continue acting but they had to go active and join Sigma before it became painfully obvious they weren't themselves any longer. Sigma had been able to hide it such a long time mainly because no one knew it was a possibility. The rise in irregular attacks had been stressful… X and Dr. Cain had made all sorts of excuses for the behavior of their first creation.

But what would have happened if the virus hadn't made itself obvious? If it had been able to spread, and spread, without any signs? The carriers continuing to live their lives, go out in public, mingle with humans without giving themselves away, even to themselves?

Until, one day, all of a sudden, they _woke up_. And the slaughter began. And quickly ended.

With a virus like that, Sigma could have taken all of MHHQ and X and Zero would have woken up in a building, in a _world_ full of mavericks one day. With a virus like that, Zero _had _taken all of Neo Arcadia, right under their noses. Sigma hadn't been able to create a virus like that. If he had been, he would have won. The other Zero, back then, had wanted to finish what Sigma had been doing for his cause, all along. If Zero was still the other Zero, they had all been living on borrowed time. With a virus that could also infect humans, he could have ordered it to kill them, stop their heart and destroy their brains, and let the mavericks mop up any stray humans that had, by some miracle, avoided infection.

Once he'd known that was a possibility, he'd had to move before that could happen. Because if he'd confronted Zero without first cutting off his ability to command the virus, then Zero could have triggered it the instant he knew the jig was up. It had already been too late for X to do anything about it if Zero had done that.

The price of trust was vulnerability. Because he'd trusted Zero, the virus had been able to get this much of a foothold. Zero had abused that trust and not trusted X in return: he'd been forced to assume that was the act of an enemy.

The necklace was back in its box on the bedside table, he saw. Either Cerveau or Ciel. Cerveau for the practical reason and Ciel because Zero was her friend. He turned the necklace over in his hands. It didn't look like it had been tampered with.

To put it back on Zero or not to put it back? If Zero could monitor their recoveries…

X didn't put it back on. Instead, he removed the coat he'd found (he wasn't going to risk handling patients with armored fingers that might bruise instead of padded ones), lay down next to Zero, made a shallow cut in his neck, and guided Zero's mouth to it.

Habit and hunger did the rest, Zero's sleeping body attached itself to X and the wound, as they had been for almost a century. Asleep, Zero wouldn't make it larger or drain more than what flowed out on its own, so this would give him a slow, constant supply to convert into virus nanites and keep Cerveau and Ciel supplied. Keep people from dying.

X almost wanted to go back to that sleep. Just him, and Zero, and the puzzle of Zero's systems. Like the century he'd spent in the care of Dr. Light's capsule, with nothing but sleep, dreams and his own systems, except not alone.

It was better when someone was there, dreaming with him.

The person Zero was now had Omega's knowledge and his Zero's knowledge. When X had questioned him, he'd acted like the person the amnesiac Zero that had helped Ciel had been becoming. Had that personality been able to subdue the other two? How, when it should have been the weakest? Except Zero had acted like X's teacher and partner most of the time. Except only Omega, of the three of them, would have viewed infection as a viable option, the virus as just a tool.

Maybe Zero really was complete, stable, instead of Omega suppressing the other personalities and imitating them the way he had tried to imitate Commander Zero, back then?

He could worry about that in the morning. He'd taken water and mineral powders, so his systems should produce more than enough nanites for Zero, and he'd only transfer over the nanites he'd made for Zero so Ceil and Cerveau could inject the patients with them instead of X's own nanites. His systems had learned the configuration of Zero's personal nanites ages ago: he could make virus if need be. He should just sleep and let them have what they needed, for now.

There was nothing else he could do.

Nothing that would bring back the dead, even if the upgraded virus could handle brain damage.

Except the virus _could _bring back dead reploids, and Zero had told the elf that he _might _be able to do humans. Unless the EMP had scrambled the backup process, or humans were just too difficult to rebuild.

Once upon a time he'd asked Zero to kill him if the virus ever took him, and now the virus was looking like a better option than death? The entire population had been maverick, including _humans_, and no one had died? It had been too good to be true, it had to be another obvious trick like Omega pretending to be his Zero.

But what if it was true?

Hunters had died and mavericks had come back no matter how many times you killed them. Weil had killed millions and endured every desperate attempt to assassinate him. Until Zero. Or Omega? The good had died and the evil had lived.

What if, what if the world could be a place where good people didn't have to die?

Where he could be with Zero, where…

Where he wouldn't have to lose everything ever again.

Twice now, he'd woken up and everyone who should have been there was dead. He'd rather find another way to seal Omega than kill Zero, but he didn't want to lose so many people. Never again.

He didn't know if he removed Zero's mouth from his neck, turned to lean over him and kissed, him, hard and long, because he wanted to forget, wanted to apologize, or wanted to get some of Zero's nanites in his systems, wanted to let Zero taste them there when he woke up and be reassured.

He'd technically been infected and hadn't realized it. They hadn't tried to _do _anything, they'd just been there, and he'd let them be there because… because _Zero_.

X had interfered with the systems of the people of the entire city, and the city's system itself. An emergency medical procedure that had caused, not solved, an emergency, when he was anything but impartial.

What had he been thinking?

The fact Zero wasn't kissing back became disturbing very quickly, and he lay back down and pulled Zero back to his neck, hating this. Hating himself for doing this.

He wanted the world to be the way it had been before Ciel... Before they'd found that Zero had protected her, yet again, in such a terrible way.


	10. Final Chapter

_I don't know why some people prefer to say that aliens did things instead of admitting that sometimes, we can't figure out how our ancestors did certain things. Geniuses have been born throughout human history, before the scientific method, remember. The idea that Native Americans needed to get the idea of a basic geometric shape from the Egyptians, or the same source as the Egyptians, is frankly ridiculous. Was there cultural contact? Did the Egyptians have South American gardening/terraforming tech? No. If they had, we'd be calling it the Sahara_ Rainforest_. Did the Amazonians have Egyptian organic battery tech? No, or the world would probably be equally different._

_The scientific basis for magic really does interest me. The fact that a placebo has a 30% chance of curing _anything_, even things we don't have medicines for or our best ones are much less effective? No wonder they were screwed without double-blind experiments. People who had abracadabra chanted over them really _were _more likely to recover than people who didn't! _

_Then there's the fact that ancient astrology really did work for a lot of really important things like childbirth and farming. Because of this, there were self-fulfilling prophecies and they didn't have modern statistics to weed those out of the data pool. _

_Then there's why Pythagoras was right about math and music. He freaked out about irrational numbers? The brain freaks out over musical dissonance. Then there's why a lot of products have orange packaging. And why tarot cards help people answer their own questions and voodoo dolls really can kill people (despite having very little to do with the real religion)._

_The golden ratio, ever-present symbols… _

_In any case: this website now has a policy against replying to reviewers in the author's notes. I hope this chapter answers the question of a certain anonymous reviewer (since I did different technobabble in this chapter...), and would like to point out some of how the virus acts in X5&6. While the fact the virus warps reality makes it kind of impossible to say 'the virus has blank property, and that requires blank other property,' going from current tech/laws of physics (and Megamanverse physics definitely have something else going on, since mass-conversion teleportation has been proven to require more energy than actually exists in the unvierse), but before I read up on Zero series the virus always did get treated more like a physical thing than a pure transmission, and organic viruses are very simple molecules in the way nanites are very tiny and simple machines. While EXEverse viruses are computer viruses, in a world where robotic life was metaphorically akin to human life (androids), it made sense that a virus that affected them would be more akin to a human virus. _

_This is the final chapter of a fic that was supposed to be cheerful crack and got derailed by angst and magical realism-style spec & technobabble. I hope it was interesting despite the fact I was forced to give up trying to get some control over it. Since I promised to never leave a fic unfinished, I will be picking up _Definition of a Reploid _and _How Does Your Garden Grow? _again as soon as I get enough of the incomplete fics currently in-progress finished off. Realistically, that means sometime around the beginning of June, since that's when _Falling _ends and I'm going to try to finish off _Lazy Sunday _first, since that's only got one chapter left. I'm publishing this chapter early as part of my personal pledge to get all this done._

* * *

Since he'd chosen to go into sleep mode and not wake up until either he had enough nanites or someone was trying to wake him up, it took him only a fraction of a second to come online, even though it must have taken much more time for his system to build up a reasonable amount of nanites this time then when he'd woken up to Cerveau feeding him or X giving him a large amount instead of a trickle.

X was under him, asleep, with a small incision on his neck. Zero's mouth had been pressed to it, even in his sleep. He must have been slowly accumulating nanites for awhile. Was he also sensing ambient virus? Someone, a human from the sound of breathing, was sitting near the bed.

"Ciel?" Zero asked.

"You're awake?" She touched his back, mostly to let him know that she was here and, "I'm okay."

"What happened?"

"We found out that I had Weil's nanites in my body, and one thing led to another until X used the dark elf to get rid of all the virus in Neo Arcadia."

"I know that much. How many people died?"

"It could have been a lot worse." She hesitated. "Can you really bring dead reploids back to life?" She'd lost so many resistance soldiers, been helpless to prevent so many innocent deaths.

"Only if they were infected at the time of death. How bad was it?"

"Bad. It's not X's fault. I agreed to it. You infected me with Weil's nanites. Without asking." _Weil's. _

"If I hadn't, you might have bled to death even after we _won_. You may have enhancements, but do you know what it was like to have you come with me? When everything I half-remembered said you were fragile and everything would be shooting at you first, and those memories were right?"

"I had to go with you on those!"

"You were only sixteen!"

"And the oldest combat capable resistance member was eight!"

"Time spent learning how to read and write doesn't count!"

"I'll have you know I was reading by the time I was three!"

"And I was reading from the moment I was turned on. Not the same thing! I had to sit in on discussions about the trade-offs, you know. We would have _killed _for more immune hunters: we would have accepted cyborg volunteers if it would have been anything but a slaughter! If those Pantheons weren't pieces of scrap you wouldn't have lasted five seconds! No, you are _nowhere_ near as durable as a reploid, and everything you did to yourself to make yourself better able to take a hit lowered your agility, and then you put in dash boots even though you _knew _what those do to your… Yes, great, humans have more spatial awareness, movement control, balance, and that's wonderful, but the price of that system is that it's optimized for what you evolved with!"

Ciel replied in a small voice, "I'm sorry I threw up on you." Those times.

"That's not the issue." He had repaired himself enough to sit up earlier, so he did. "You're lucky that energy barrier was the first time you gave yourself a concussion! You should have cracked your head open about five times in the first week with those stunts! And I didn't know what to tell you not to do, do you know what that looks like in hindsight!"

Before Zero could wave at her, X grabbed his arm. "Yes. She was trying to get herself killed. You should remember what that's like, Zero. That was why I did as many missions with you as I could." It took Ciel or X, in the energy form he'd learned from the mother elf, to gather information, since Zero hadn't remembered anything about how to use computers or hack. "She was your commander, Zero. She was in charge and you didn't know. If she had killed herself, it wouldn't have been your responsibility."

"I took responsibility for the resistance when I _joined_."

"No, I asked Ciel to take responsibility for _you_. She was the one who asked you to risk your life for her, not the other way around." No, that argument wasn't going to get anywhere. Once Zero decided to fight for someone, once he decided they were worth it, he wasn't going to let chains of command, the other person refusing his help, or unalterable reality excuse him if anything happened to them. Sigma, Iris… "But I understand why you were worried. _I _was worried. You still should have told us."

"I was going to tell you once everything was stable."

"So we would have proof that the virus wasn't hurting anything? Everything has been calm," although they were still swamped with work, "for how many weeks now?" X sighed. "I should have realized that you wouldn't tell us, even if I _know _you must have thought about the consequences of us discovering it on our own." That it would _not _look good.

"You were so relieved. You were so happy, when you knew I was your Zero again. I didn't want to risk that." I didn't want you to be afraid.

"Well, since the honeymoon is already over, is there anything _else _you aren't telling me?"

"…I think I hit the high points back then. After Eurasia." That Zero had been the source of the virus… Wait, _had _X figured out that he was responsible for the Cataclysm? "There might be something else you don't know, but… not right now." He could tell X. He couldn't tell Ciel. At least not both at once.

Both the people he fought for, part of him whispered. At least until he could bring Iris back, and… he couldn't bring Sigma back. Sigma was the hero Zero never had been, the hero he'd tried to be, but Sigma wasn't X. He wouldn't be able to bear the memories, and he wasn't stupid, he'd look up what had happened and blame himself even if Zero erased his memories. He was a strategist; he'd know what the wars had done. The virus had used his mind to _do _that planning; he'd be able to understand all the ramifications of the wars.

He should delete him from the virus, but… No, maybe eventually.

Maybe X could help him? X had raised him, along with Dr. Cain.

Not now, though. Not when he needed to convince them to let him use the virus to help.

"Is it relevant to what's happening right now?" X asked.

"_No_." Hell no. The idea was horrifying. He wasn't going to destroy the world again. There was barely any of it _left_.

So it was bad, very, very bad, but not an emergency? When there were actual emergencies happening right now? "…Alright." But Zero _was _going to tell him.

"Thank you."

"How are the patients doing?" X asked Ciel.

"They're almost all… we should probably pick a word other than infected. If we tell people we were deliberately infecting them with a relative of the maverick virus, there will be panic." Ciel knew _she _had freaked. She'd thought she was used to the worst, but this had actually sent her into hysterics, a panic attack, wanting to claw at her skin to _get it out_. X had been the one to slap her, since he knew ancient remedies like that and how much force you could apply without snapping a human's neck.

Except she would probably survive breaking her neck.

"What did you tell them?" Zero asked morbidly.

"Repair nanites. Experimental, but better than dying," was Ciel's summation.

Zero closed his eyes to check on the web. There were a lot of small energy nodes throughout the city that weren't hooked up to the web yet. How fast the virus took over (although it wasn't taking over these days) did depend on the initial dose, and right now most of the energy it drew from Cyberspace was taken up by the repair work. Performing repairs, creating sugar for the humans who needed their energy in that form, and there were also a lot of vitamins that could be built out of stuff in the human body. If they were low on minerals, though, they were out of luck. It would be awhile before a lot of them were able to create spare virus.

"Only a few people are infectious. It'll be awhile before the rest of them are. You were giving a lot of them really low doses, weren't you?" Another point winked out. "My virus is still a virus: a successful infection starting from just one strand or nanite is ridiculous. Nanites wear out, and if there isn't enough to get a foothold, somewhere they can work and create more of themselves without the immune system going after them? Did you try to infect any humans multiple times with a low dose?"

"I tried blood transfusions at one point, but it didn't work."

For a moment, Zero wondered how Ciel could possibly be that stupid before remembering that this was Ciel, not Dr. Wily. She might know robotics and reploid medicine, but he couldn't really expect her to know even the basics about how human diseases worked. She'd gotten so good at her specialty in such a short time by _specializing_.

"Ciel, in order for the virus to work to heal you, it has to make more virus to do those repairs. It can't even stay in your body unless there's at least enough virus to replace itself before it all wears out. There is virus in your bloodstream, _some_, but it focuses on vital systems first. And the virus creates specialized sub-nanites, anyway. Nanites are _small. _They don't all do ten thousand things. The nanites the virus produces to fix human cells don't have the ability to create more virus. Do you know what an allergy is?"

X did. "Can you work around it if they get one?"

"Of course, the virus is good at adapting. But if the body keeps destroying nanites before the nanites can adapt to look harmless that'll make it tough to infect, and allergies, as opposed to just identifying something as a disease and building antibodies to rip it apart, develop over time. If they decide to become allergic to my virus after it's already colonized their bone marrow, the virus would have to… Are there any patients in your hospital with diseases that aren't injuries or obviously caused by the virus?"

"There's been a rash of flu and other cases, probably because the notification that that the water treatment system had become unreliable didn't get out fast enough." Everyone in public works had assumed someone else had done it, since it was an obvious measure and they were swamped.

Zero cursed, pushing X aside so he could get to the edge of the bed and stand up. "Where are you keeping them?"

"Why?" X wondered, but didn't stop him.

"The human immune system makes your anti hacking defenses look like a 'thank you for not infecting me' sign. I will say one thing for Weil: he knew his stuff. Of course, he cared about himself more than anyone else and it wasn't like he had anything else to do up in outer space more important than trying not to die. Most of the time, fevers, coughing, and other stray fluids," runny noses, throwing up, "aren't caused by diseases. They're caused by what human bodies are doing to kill the disease. There's this old quote that your unit used to use a lot, 'we had to destroy the village in order to save it,' remember?" The seventeenth had believed that buildings could be replaced: people were harder, and people were safer when mavericks couldn't sneak up on them.

"The pulse would have fried the virus nanites. Ruining their camouflage and leaving nanite particles floating around everywhere. Most of your flu patients are probably trying to kill something that's already dead. Only their immune systems probably won't figure that out until a few vital organs have been destroyed by friendly fire, since my virus doesn't act like a biological one so they won't know quite what to do with it. As for what will happen if they decide to treat one of the metals in the nanites as an allergen? Forget the people whose immune systems were in the process of being upgraded by the virus or shut down while something tricky happened."

Ciel winced. "Because of the pulse?"

"Because of secondary infections." X was already moving. "Neo Arcadia is still a public health nightmare. It's too easy for disease to spread when bathwater is rationed, and easy disease transmission breeds deadlier diseases, since there's no incentive to keep the host alive so that they can infect the next host. They would have gone to one of the temporary hospital sites, meaning they would have been around sick people…"

"X? It's been three days. Anyone whose immune system was shut down when the pulse went off is dead already. That's why I said to forget them. Humans wouldn't have evolved immune systems that were such two-edged swords if they didn't _need _them."

X was staring at him even as he put his extra comm gear on and shouldered the medical pack.

"What?"

"It's… you. Discussing medical issues. Instead of just…" Saying the minimum, like injury reports and that he needed more of 'that.' Zero had _hated _thinking about medical things, not just because of the way thinking about the virus made everyone shudder but because of his personal shame.

"You need to know this so you'll let me do what I need to in order to save the ones that can be saved."

"You want to save them. Humans."

"…I'm not going to just sit back and let people die." What was X getting at? Zero would have been hurt by the implication if he hadn't had the feeling that X was getting at _something_.

"Humans are people to you now." X smiled for a moment, finally relaxing. "Back then, you said that you never wanted to kill people." And that was Omega. If Zero saw humans as people now, then they really didn't have to fight any longer. "I'm glad." He met Zero's eyes for a moment, his own eyes soft, before getting back to business. "We have to hurry." They could reconcile and celebrate when people weren't dying.

Zero nodded, focusing. "Dr. Wily's later generators drew energy from Cyberspace: I can use them to summon the type of energy we need for this. If the dark elf can broadcast it over the city, that would give the virus the energy it needs to reproduce, repair, and spread."

"I'll modify the diagram I used for the antivirus. Can you check my work?"

"There's a difference between knowing how to move my arm and knowing how to program that movement. Just create a low ambient level, I can take it from there."

"Something like the airborne virus during the Eurasia incident? You said that you could monitor the entire area: could you use that to repair the infrastructure?"

"One thing at a time. If you're giving me carte blanche, then I _could _just set the virus to produce fats, sugars and the rest of that stuff for humans. Like plants, only using that kind of energy instead of sunlight. Reploids I can just have it recharge directly."

"Is that why Dr. Weil didn't starve to death on that shuttle?" Ciel asked, having to walk quickly to keep up.

"Exactly. All it takes is energy and raw materials. Dr. Weil's a special case, though. Vulnerability to sunlight, inability to produce the things he needed to live… If you hadn't launched his Nightmare up there with him, he'd have starved himself until he shut down before long." Instead of staying conscious the whole time.

X's eyes widened. "…Your symptoms? Really?"

"You're the one that said the symbols had been around a long time. People evil enough to count as demons, evil enough that even hell won't take them? Dr. Weil was _like me_, and apparently things that humans had to fight things like that work on me. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…"

Ciel frowned. "Vampirism? That's ridiculous. Weil actually _let _someone put a stake through his heart once." He'd let them get that close, just to dash all hope. Practically _dared _them to come attack him. If they killed them, they'd live and their families would be freed. If not…

"If you look it up, it wasn't that easy, Ciel. How _did _you keep him from coming back?"

"I had to absorb the nanites and energy that contained his personality." Let them think Zero had vaporized them instead of eaten them.

"They might have had energy manipulation, or a specific form of energy, at least, but they didn't have nanites," X countered. On the other hand, the Romans had used steam engines as children's toys. The Egyptians had been able to make batteries from recyclable, organic components, too, and the modern world could _really _use that technology. Europe had been dismissive of pre-scientific method technology because it was science that had allowed Europe to pull itself out of the dark ages, which had set its tech level _much _further back than the Cataclysm had Earth's, since there had been several concerted efforts to destroy all knowledge that didn't fit with their religion: burning the library at Alexandria, burning all the decent medical practitioners…

It had given them a very inaccurate view of human intelligence and ingenuity (which was frankly insulting to humanity as a species), since they'd assumed all the other cultures they encountered were as benighted as their own ancestors.

It had gotten to the point, X had seen when he'd studied the era of his family and wanted to learn about the alien Duo, that some had said that anything their ancestors had done that they couldn't figure out how to accomplish simply _must _have been done by aliens. Did they think that the original, true Damascus steel had been made by aliens instead foreign craftsmen that had been persecuted into oblivion? They'd eventually managed to create an extremely high-tech means of mimicking Damascus steel, but hadn't been able to figure out the original method. X still had no idea how to start doing something like the original craftsmen had, and it would be incredibly helpful to be able to do materials work that normally required rare and hard to make precision equipment without said precision tools.

No, the lack of nanites didn't necessarily mean anything. And while Dr. Wily's sample of that energy had originated from outer space and there had been aliens involved, that didn't necessarily mean that this wasn't a naturally occurring substance that humans had been forced to find a way to deal with on their own, before Duo showed up. Humans, and anyone influenced by human culture (i.e. everyone) incorporated vast amounts of symbols, ratios, geometric shapes into anything they designed. It was just… traditional. How it was done. People might scoff at the idea that certain things were good luck, but they still used the golden ratio, circles, and a plethora of other shapes. Buildings that didn't were ugly… how much of it was simply that symbols had subconscious effects and computers preferred order (both reploid processors and human brains were computers) and how much was energy manipulation?

"Weil just used nanites because he was deriving everything from my virus' nanites. They were the source of… that energy he had access to. It's capable of interfacing with human cells _just _fine on its own. It just tends to cause mental disorders and weird mutations." From Dr. Wily's data.

"Hearing voices, paranoid delusions… This really _was _the cause of some cases of so-called demonic possession. What exactly is this substance?"

"Evil energy." They waited for him to elaborate. "No, that's actually the technical term. And a _very _good description. Weil had so much power to draw on because of all the people he'd killed and driven mad. He still never would have stood a chance against me, though. Not enough victims," he said, wry instead of boasting.

"…Awhile longer, and he would have killed more than the virus did."

"There are what, twenty million people left, human and reploid? There just aren't enough people to come anywhere near _my _kill count. It would have taken centuries of decent treatment for there to be enough, and of course he wasn't going to do _that_."

Ciel and Cerveau still thought he was talking about the virus. X knew better. "There won't be any ill effects from having something like that in their brains." There had better not be.

"No." I promise.

"Alright. I trust you." Despite the deaths, despite the lies, despite the even more terrible truths, he truly did.

"Do you want to get married after this is over?" Zero found himself blurting out when X said that.

"Zero, this is not the time." They had more pressing things to think about. X's lips still curved upward. "The answer's yes, by the way. Just so that wondering doesn't distract you."


End file.
